Pull The Plug Quotes

Telling me I can do anything I want is like pulling the plug out of the bath and then telling the water it can go anywhere it wants. Try it, and see what happens.

She can go with us to the lab and keep Myrnin pinned down while we pull the plug, if he's not... you know, better." "Define BETTER with that guy." "Not all fangs and raaaaar.

So okay― there you are in your room with the shade down and the door shut and the plug pulled out of the base of the telephone. You've blown up your TV and committed yourself to a thousand words a day, come hell or high water. Now comes the big question: What are you going to write about? And the equally big answer: Anything you damn well want.

What do you do with all this bank, Josie? Be a lot easier if you just lifted your skirt.” “The only reason I’d lift my skirt is to pull out my pistol and plug you in the head.

I brought music." I pull my iPhone and ear buds out of my bra and plug them in my ears. "What else do you have in there?

Butler snapped his fingers. "Focus, Artemis! Time enough for your Atlantis Complex later. We have the Atlantis Trench outside that door and six miles of water above it. If you want to stay alive, you need to stay alert." He turned to Holly. "This is ridiculous. I'm pulling the plug." Holly's mouth was a tight line as she shook her head. "Navy rules, Butler. You're on my boat, you follow my orders." "As I remember, I brought the boat." "Yes, thanks for bringing my boat.

The largest one laughed. Until Natalya's glass shard plugged his jugular. Regin aimed and pulled the trigger. The gun kicked as bullets sprayed. It was shredding their torsos like cheese, halving their bodies. "Let's do this! Rock out with your cocks out!

Why are we so worried about artificial intelligence? Surely humans are always able to pull the plug? People asked a computer, ‘Is there a God?’ And the computer said, ‘There is now,’ and fused the plug.

And Ulysses stopped up his ears against the siren’s song,” recited Victor, pulling the plugs from his own ears as Serena collapsed to the dirt lot, “for it was death.

There was something capricious about God. How could one expect perfect submission from those who are imperfect? How could one create desire and then expect everyone to pull the plug on it? And if God were capricious, then God was imperfect. If God were imperfect, God was not God.

Miles exhaled carefully, faint with rage and reminded grief. He does not know, he told himself. He cannot know... "Ivan, one of these days somebody is going to pull out a weapon and plug you, and you're going to die in bewilderment, crying, "What did I say? What did I say?" "What did I say?" asked Ivan indignantly.

I pull my iPod out of my backpack and plug it in. It's the first thing I do every time I get in it, like a ritual. Music soothes the soul; at least it helps soothe mine.

We’re all just a collection of wires pulled tight, charged beyond capacity—a tangle of plugs and valves, waiting for a surge to take down the whole system.

The next thing you do when the plug’s pulled, after panicking, is run to the nearest window. You don’t know why exactly. It’s that better-see-what’s-going-on feeling. The world works from the outside in. So if the lights go off, you look outside.

The challenge lies in knowing how to bring this sort of day to a close. His mind has been wound to a pitch of concentration by the interactions of the office. Now there are only silence and the flashing of the unset clock on the microwave. He feels as if he had been playing a computer game which remorselessly tested his reflexes, only to have its plug suddenly pulled from the wall. He is impatient and restless, but simultaneously exhausted and fragile. He is in no state to engage with anything significant. It is of course impossible to read, for a sincere book would demand not only time, but also a clear emotional lawn around the text in which associations and anxieties could emerge and be disentangled. He will perhaps only ever do one thing well in his life. For this particular combination of tiredness and nervous energy, the sole workable solution is wine. Office civilisation could not be feasible without the hard take-offs and landings effected by coffee and alcohol.

Time to pull the plug on the coma of the left, right paradigm

Specialists debated whether to pull the plug, but Texas only executes people on death row, not when they’re brain-dead, because it might mean culling most of their politicians.

I bite my fingernails till they look like disease, pull strips of my skin away. Get Daddy's razor out cabinet. Cut cut cut arm wrist, not trying to die, trying to plug myself back in. (111)

The secret of surviving housework is simply to do it. Pull the plug on the part of your brain that always wants to negotiate everything. You need to change a diaper, rinse a bottle, clean a spill, fluff a pillow? Consider it done. It's a no-brainer. End of conversation. End of story. Not postponing chores-and not spending any mental energy equivocating, temporizing, or stalling-is actually a lot more restful than worrying about what needs to be done.

Normally death came at night, taking a person in their sleep, stopping their heart or tickling them awake, leading them to the bathroom with a splitting headache before pouncing and flooding their brain with blood. It waits in alleys and metro stops. After the sun goes down plugs are pulled by white-clad guardians and death is invited into an antiseptic room. But in the country death comes, uninvited, during the day. It takes fishermen in their longboats. It grabs children by the ankles as they swim. In winter it calls them down a slope too steep for their budding skills, and crosses their skies at the tips. It waits along the shore where snow met ice not long ago but now, unseen by sparkling eyes, a little water touches the shore, and the skater makes a circle slightly larger than intended. Death stands in the woods with a bow and arrow at dawn and dusk. And it tugs cars off the road in broad daylight, the tires spinning furiously on ice or snow, or bright autumn leaves.

It was like a blackout in reverse. Since around nine o’clock, no lamps could be switched off, no electrical appliances powered down. If you tried to pull out the plug there was an alarming crackling sound and sparks flew between the outlet and the plug, preventing the circuit from being broken.

And it was exactly like having flu that time because I wanted it to stop, like you can just pull the plug of a computer out of the wall if it crashes, because I wanted to go to sleep so that I wouldn't have to think because the only thing I could think was how much it hurt because there was no room for anything else in my head, but I couldn't go to sleep and I just had to sit there and there was nothing to do except to wait and hurt.

The purpose of practice is not to increase knowledge but to scrape the scales off the eyes, to pull the plugs out of the ears.

Shh!" said Ford. "It's conical. So what you do is, you see, you fill it with fine white sand, alright? Or sugar. Fine white sand, and/or sugar. Anything. Doesn't matter. Sugar's fine. And when it's full, you pull the plug out... are you listening?" "I'm listening." "You pull the plug out, and it all just twirls away, twirls away you see, out of the plughole. "Clever." "That's not the clever bit. This is the clever bit, I remember now that this is the clever bit. The clever bit is that you then thread the film in the projector... backwards!" "Backwards?" "Yes. Threading it backwards is definitely the clever bit. So then, you just sit and watch it, and everything just appears to spiral upwards out of the plughole and fill the bath. See?" "And that's how the Universe began is it?" said Arthur. "No," said Ford, "but it's a marvelous way to relax.

Stay Stupid The three dumbest guys I can think of: Charles Lindbergh, Steve Jobs, Winston Churchill. Why? Because any smart person who understood how impossibly arduous were the tasks they had set themselves would have pulled the plug before he even began. Ignorance and arrogance are the artist and entrepreneur’s indispensable allies. She must be clueless enough to have no idea how difficult her enterprise is going to be—and cocky enough to believe she can pull it off anyway. How do we achieve this state of mind? By staying stupid. By not allowing ourselves to think. A child has no trouble believing the unbelievable, nor does the genius or the madman. It’s only you and I, with our big brains and our tiny hearts, who doubt and overthink and hesitate. Don’t think. Act.

Eddie saw great things and near misses. Albert Einstein as a child, not quite struck by a run-away milk-wagon as he crossed a street. A teenage boy named Albert Schweitzer getting out of a bathtub and not quite stepping on the cake of soap lying beside the pulled plug. A Nazi Oberleutnant burning a piece of paper with the date and place of the D-Day Invasion written on it. He saw a man who intended to poison the entire water supply of Denver die of a heart attack in a roadside rest-stop on I-80 in Iowa with a bag of McDonald’s French fries on his lap. He saw a terrorist wired up with explosives suddenly turn away from a crowded restaurant in a city that might have been Jerusalem. The terrorist had been transfixed by nothing more than the sky, and the thought that it arced above the just and unjust alike. He saw four men rescue a little boy from a monster whose entire head seemed to consist of a single eye. But more important than any of these was the vast, accretive weight of small things, from planes which hadn’t crashed to men and women who had come to the correct place at the perfect time and thus founded generations. He saw kisses exchanged in doorways and wallets returned and men who had come to a splitting of the way and chosen the right fork. He saw a thousand random meetings that weren’t random, ten thousand right decisions, a hundred thousand right answers, a million acts of unacknowledged kindness. He saw the old people of River Crossing and Roland kneeling in the dust for Aunt Talitha’s blessing; again heard her giving it freely and gladly. Heard her telling him to lay the cross she had given him at the foot of the Dark Tower and speak the name of Talitha Unwin at the far end of the earth. He saw the Tower itself in the burning folds of the rose and for a moment understood its purpose: how it distributed its lines of force to all the worlds that were and held them steady in time’s great helix. For every brick that landed on the ground instead of some little kid’s head, for every tornado that missed the trailer park, for every missile that didn’t fly, for every hand stayed from violence, there was the Tower. And the quiet, singing voice of the rose. The song that promised all might be well, all might be well, that all manner of things might be well.

Our relationship died the same day Lily did; we just let our love stay on life support a little longer, but I’m pulling the plug.

Life is iffy. We never know when it might pull the plug (we don’t know opponent’s strategy), so we should live and enjoy every moment to its fullest (minimize losses. Enjoy this moment—this, this very moment. Live today, as if there’s no tomorrow.

He was the thing the world had suffered from most in her four billion years of existence: a stupid man with power. When the lights of the universe went out one day, standing over the plug, having pulled it despite all warnings, would be a man like Deputy Kelby.

Jacey, I can never give you what you want. You want someone who can open up and discuss feelings, someone who will be an active participant in your life. That’s not me and it never will be. We need to pull the plug on this thing now, because once again, you’re falling for the wrong guy.

Shoot it down," he's yelling. "Pull the plug. Give me a gun and I'll do it," he's yelling. "Just get that damn blimp out of the air." "No can do," the events coordinator says. The minute the wedding party comes out of the stadium, the crew in the blimp will dump fifteen thousand pounds of rice over the parking lot.

If you’re worried I have some devious secret plan to seduce you, you can just pull my plug out.

At some point, even the most voracious of readers needs to pull the plug and stop the constant drip of facts, figures, and meaningless Internet fights.

Why are we so worried about artificial intelligence? Surely humans are always able to pull the plug? People asked a computer, “Is there a God?” And the computer said, “There is now,” and fused the plug.

You want to get your book to press. You rush it through. Revision number twenty—done. Do you really need twenty more? Yes. A half-baked book is a half-birthed child. It aborts, is put on life support; reviewers line the hall to pull the plug.

Idiot, he tells himself. How long will you keep yourself on this intravenous drip? Just enough illusion to keep you alive. Pull the plug, why don’t you? Give up your tinsel stickers, your paper cutouts, your colored crayons. Face the plain, unvarnished grime of real life. But real life is brilliantly colored, says another part of his brain. It’s made up of every possible hue, including those we can’t see. All nature is a fire: everything forms, everything blossoms, everything fades. We are slow clouds…

I think it is unethical to be kept alive by machines. I told Jim yes, he could pull the plug. But I had one caveat before I signed my name: If Jim got remarried to some climbing, comedy fan–girl skank, my vengeful and capricious ghost would haunt him forever.

Jim watched them eat, his eyes fixed on every morsel that entered their mouth. When the oldest of the four soldiers had finished he scraped some burnt rice and fish scales from the side of the cooking pot. A first-class private of some forty years, with slow, careful hands, he beckoned Jim forward and handed him his mess tin. As they smoked their cigarettes the Japanese smiled to themselves, watching Jim devour the shreds of fatty rice. It was his first hot food since he had left he hospital, and the heat and greasy flavour stung his gums. Tears swam in his eyes. The Japanese soldier who had taken pity on Jim, recognising that this small boy was starving, began to laugh good-naturedly, and pulled the rubber plug from his metal water-bottle. Jim drank the clear, chlorine-flavoured liquid, so unlike the stagnant water in the taps of the Columbia Road. He choked, carefully swallowed his vomit, and tittered into his hands, grinning at the Japanese. Soon they were all laughing together, sitting back in the deep grass beside the drained swimming-pool.

They hang around, hitting on your friends or else you never hear from them again. They call when they’re drunk, or finally get sober, they’re passing through town and want dinner, they take your hand across the table, kiss you when you come back from the bathroom. They were your loves, your victims, your good dogs or bad boys, and they’re over you now. One writes a book in which a woman who sounds suspiciously like you is the first to be sadistically dismembered by a serial killer. They’re getting married and want you to be the first to know, or they’ve been fired and need a loan, their new girlfriend hates you, they say they don’t miss you but show up in your dreams, calling to you from the shoe boxes where they’re buried in rows in your basement. Some nights you find one floating into bed with you, propped on an elbow, giving you a look of fascination, a look that says I can’t believe I’ve found you. It’s the same way your current boyfriend gazed at you last night, before he pulled the plug on the tiny white lights above the bed, and moved against you in the dark broken occasionally by the faint restless arcs of headlights from the freeway’s passing trucks, the big rigs that travel and travel, hauling their loads between cities, warehouses, following the familiar routes of their loneliness.

We have a solemn pact.' Kaye nodded to Mother and looked over at Em talking to some neighbors. 'If one of us is unconscious in the hospital, the others will make sure it's pulled.' 'The plug?' Ruth asked. 'The chin hair,' said Kaye, eyeing Ruth with some alarm. 'You're off the visitors list. Mother, make a note.

Draw the curtains and let them fall cry your worries and let the fear stand tall. Lie on the bed and throw the ash on the ground and let the darkness surround. Pull the plug before the sunrise brings false hope again and tries to take your pain away. Curtains fall as the the scene ends and disappears like happiness in the air.

Oh, I think my new slave is a wanton little slut. Aren’t you?” “No, I’m a good boy,” he moaned as he pushed his ass back on my hand. “I’m not a whore!” “You’re my whore,” I growled and fucked him with my fingers as I picked up the flogger someone had left on the table. I started spanking him hard with it. “Does my boy want to come?” “Yes,” he hissed and jumped when I slapped him with the toy again. “Please, master? I’ll do anything you want.” “You’ll do it whether I let you come or not!” I pulled my fingers free and walked over to the wall of toys. I grabbed a large butt plug and quickly pushed it into his ass. Then, before he could even get used to the size of it, I slapped the flogger against it. “Admit you’re a dirty slut.” “No! I’m a good boy,” Shely cried out again. “Please don’t breach my ass! I’ve never been with a man before.

A picnic. Imagine: a forest, a country road, a meadow. A car pulls off the road into the meadow and unloads young men, bottles, picnic baskets, girls, transistor radios, cameras … A fire is lit, tents are pitched, music is played. And in the morning they leave. The animals, birds, and insects that were watching the whole night in horror crawl out of their shelters. And what do they see? An oil spill, a gasoline puddle, old spark plugs and oil filters strewn about … Scattered rags, burnt-out bulbs, someone has dropped a monkey wrench. The wheels have tracked mud from some godforsaken swamp … and, of course, there are the remains of the campfire, apple cores, candy wrappers, tins, bottles, someone’s handkerchief, someone’s penknife, old ragged newspapers, coins, wilted flowers from another meadow …” “I get it,” said Noonan. “A roadside picnic.

disappointed when I pulled the plug.

Redundancy is like a plug being pulled out in a bath tub. Everything goes down the drain, your livelihood, your dreams, your car, your house, and your family.

It’s literally written in the stars and strung together with twinkle lights. It’s so bright and beautiful, and you keep pulling the plug from the outlet,” she says.

Sooner or later, her daughter would find out for herself what it meant to live in a world that pulled the plug on the Van Peebleses.

I close the door and plug the secure line into my laptop and pull up the triumvirate of Carolyn Brock, Liz Greenfield, and Sam Haber of Homeland Security on a three-way split screen.

Mari had stopped responding to the outside world, she'd pulled the plug on the whole system, she was taking a break—I felt convinced of this. Because, as she saw things right now, life was nothing but pain.

It's not that I'm being shy. It's just that -- well, for one, I don't even remember the event. It's a blank: a white slate, a black hole. I have vague images, half-impressions: of being, or having been -- or, more precisely, being about to be -- hit; blue light; railings; lights of other colours; being held above some kind of tray or bed. But who's to say that these are genuine memories? Who's to say my traumatized mind didn't just make them up, or pull them out from somewhere else, some other slot, and stick them there to plug the gap -- the crater -- that the accident had blown? Minds are versatile and wily things. Real chancers.

Old age is a crossroad in the sense that it is the point at which two forces cross at right angles. The one force is the unyielding temptation to rest; the other is the determination to go on. If the warrior surrenders to the temptation to rest, the aging process of the body pulls the plug on his personal power, and before long he will have become just as feeble as any average man in his old age. If, on the other hand, the warrior fights off the temptation to rest, he performs yet another miracle, and so brings about a ninety degree shift in his awareness which enables him to enter into that peculiar state termed the definitive journey of a warrior.

Now: I am an affectionate man but I have much trouble showing it. When I was younger I used to worry so much about being alone - of being unlovable or incapable of love. As the years went on, my worries changed. I worried that I had become incapable of having a relationship, of offering intimacy. I felt as though the world lived inside a warm house at night and I was outside, and I couldn't be seen - because I was out there in the night. But now I am inside that house and it feels just the same. Being alone here now, all of my old fears are erupting - the fears I thought I had buried forever by getting married: fear of loneliness; fear that being in and out of love too many times itself makes you harder to love; fear that I would never experience real love; fear that someone would fall in love with me, get extremely close, learn everything about me and then pull the plug; fear that love is only important up until a certain point after which everything is negotiable. For so many years I lived a life of solitude and I thought life was fine. But I knew that unless I explored intimacy and shared intimacy with someone else then life would never progress beyond a certain point. I remember thinking that unless I knew what was going on inside of someone else's head other than my own I was going to explode.

[Uh-oh, it's bath time for Calvin.] MOM, who sits in the living room, has turned toward the door. Very likely she is screaming the following words at the top of her lungs: CALVIN! Quiet down and quit that splashing! I don't want to have to clean the whole bathroom! CALVIN: Ha! I pulled the plug! Down the drain with you! DIE, FIEND! DIE, DIE!! MOM [By now she's sitting in a normal position on her armchair, trying to read a book, when she has apparently just heard an unexpected noise]: Don't tell me he's letting the water out already. CALVIN, now standing right in back of his mother. He's naked, scowling full force, and dripping: Believe it, lady.

I’m all right now,” I said, “but leave me alone. I’m going down to the river to bathe.” I took seven steps, and then someone must have pulled out the plug, because I gurgled, everything swirled, and the world ran away down the drain.

[Hilary] ...after you left, I didn't understand what had happened. David, I don't hate you and I don't blame you. I don't think you were happy, and I wasn't that happy either. We were just coasting, seeing what would happen, and then you pulled the plug. Right?

He lifted his gaze to hers. "I have a lot of other things I should be doing, but I'm here." He stared into her eyes for several heartbeats before he returned his attention to the big box. "I've tried to stay away. After you threw me out of the house, I thought it was probably for the best. You're a distraction, and I don't need a distraction right now." He handed the screwdriver back to her and ripped the box open with his big hands. "I've got tapes I need to review, and plays I need to go over in my head before today's practice, yet here I am. Putting baby furniture together for you because I can't get you out of my head. I plug in a tape, and all I do is think about you." He peeled back the cardboard and reached for the instruction sheet that had fallen to the floor. "But the thing is, Adele, I'm not really sure whether you want me to be here or not." His polo shirt pulled out of the waistband of his Levi's and slid up the tan muscles of his back. He straightened and looked at her over the top of the instructions. "I don't know what you want.

I know what things look like, superficially. After all, we saw Alexander Yakovlev – the ideology chief of the Communist Party Soviet Union – denouncing Lenin in 1991! The idea that communism was defeated, that Lenin was no longer an icon, was underscored by Soviet Russia’s leading Leninist! Ask yourself how this is possible. Why would a party and an empire intentionally pull the plug on itself? They had nuclear weapons. They had the KGB. They had the Red Army. And then, Boris Yeltsin stopped a coup by walking out and standing on a tank while his KGB bodyguard looked on passively. Do you really believe it was honestly done? J.R.Nyquist

In mid-morning, Qwilleran set out from the barn carrying a baker’s box tied with red plaid ribbon. He said goodbye to the cats, told them where he was going, and estimated when he would return. The more you talk to cats, he believed, the smarter they become. Koko was disturbingly smart. Qwilleran called him a fine fellow and had a great deal of respect for him. Yum Yum was a dainty little female with winning ways and a fondness for laps, the contents of wastebaskets, and small shiny objects she could hide under the rug. He gave them some parting instructions. “Don’t answer the phone. Don’t pull the plug on the refrigerator. Don’t open the door to poll-takers.” They looked at him blankly.

What did we talk about? I don't remember. We talked so hard and sat so still that I got cramps in my knee. We had too many cups of tea and then didn't want to leave the table to go to the bathroom because we didn't want to stop talking. You will think we talked of revolution but we didn't. Nor did we talk of our own souls. Nor of sewing. Nor of babies. Nor of departmental intrigue. It was political if by politics you mean the laboratory talk that characters in bad movies are perpetually trying to convey (unsuccessfully) when they Wrinkle Their Wee Brows and say (valiantly--dutifully--after all, they didn't write it) "But, Doctor, doesn't that violate Finagle's Constant?" I staggered to the bathroom, released floods of tea, and returned to the kitchen to talk. It was professional talk. It left my grey-faced and with such concentration that I began to develop a headache. We talked about Mary Ann Evans' loss of faith, about Emily Brontë's isolation, about Charlotte Brontë's blinding cloud, about the split in Virginia Woolf's head and the split in her economic condition. We talked about Lady Murasaki, who wrote in a form that no respectable man would touch, Hroswit, a little name whose plays "may perhaps amuse myself," Miss Austen, who had no more expression in society than a firescreen or a poker. They did not all write letters, write memoirs, or go on the stage. Sappho--only an ambiguous, somewhat disagreeable name. Corinna? The teacher of Pindar. Olive Schriener, growing up on the veldt, wrote on book, married happily, and ever wrote another. Kate Chopin wrote a scandalous book and never wrote another. (Jean has written nothing.). There was M-ry Sh-ll-y who wrote you know what and Ch-rl-tt- P-rk-ns G-lm-an, who wrote one superb horror study and lots of sludge (was it sludge?) and Ph-ll-s Wh--tl-y who was black and wrote eighteenth century odes (but it was the eighteenth century) and Mrs. -nn R-dcl-ff- S-thw-rth and Mrs. G--rg- Sh-ld-n and (Miss?) G--rg-tt- H-y-r and B-rb-r- C-rtl-nd and the legion of those, who writing, write not, like the dead Miss B--l-y of the poem who was seduced into bad practices (fudging her endings) and hanged herself in her garter. The sun was going down. I was blind and stiff. It's at this point that the computer (which has run amok and eaten Los Angeles) is defeated by some scientifically transcendent version of pulling the plug; the furniture stood around unknowing (though we had just pulled out the plug) and Lady, who got restless when people talked at suck length because she couldn't understand it, stuck her head out from under the couch, looking for things to herd. We had talked for six hours, from one in the afternoon until seven; I had at that moment an impression of our act of creation so strong, so sharp, so extraordinarily vivid, that I could not believe all our talking hadn't led to something more tangible--mightn't you expect at least a little blue pyramid sitting in the middle of the floor?

I’m waiting until the divorce is official. I’ve never gone back on my word or my vows, even with someone who didn’t deserve it. I’d want that person I end up with to know they don’t ever have to doubt me.” I already hated this imaginary person. With a passion. I was going to pull the plug out of her tires. His next words didn’t make me like his imaginary next wife any more either. “I always figured I’d grow old with someone, so I need to make the next one count since it’s for keeps.” My heart started acting weird next. And he kept going, signing her death warrant without even knowing it. “She wouldn’t be my first, but she’d be the only one who ever mattered. I think she could wait for the time to be right. I’d make sure she never regretted it.

If [Hurricane] Katrina pulled back the curtain on the reality of racism in America, the BP [Deepwater Horizon] disaster pulls back the curtain on something far more hidden: how little control even the most ingenious among us have over the awesome, intricately interconnected natural forces with which we so casually meddle. BP has spent weeks failing to plug the hole in the earth that it made. Our political leaders cannot order fish species to survive, or bottlenose dolphins not to die in droves. No amount of compensation money can replace a culture that has lots its roots. And while politicians and corporate leaders have yet to come to terms with these humbling truths, the people whose air, water, and livelihoods have been contaminated are losing their illusions fast.

Rawson points out that although snakes can’t taste, they have a primitive sense of smell. They’ll extend their tongue to gather volatile molecules and then pull it back in and plug it into the vomeronasal organ at the roof of the mouth to get a reading. Snakes are keenly attuned to the aroma of favored prey—so much so that if you slip a rat’s face and hide, Hannibal Lecter–style, over the snout of a non-favored prey item, a python will try to swallow it.

This seat taken?" My eyes grazing over the only other occupant, a guy with long glossy dark hair with his head bent over a book. "It's all yours," he says. And when he lifts his head and smiles,my heart just about leaps from my chest. It's the boy from my dreams. The boy from the Rabbit Hole,the gas station,and the cave-sitting before me with those same amazing,icy-blue eues, those same alluring lips I've kissed multiple times-but only in slumber, never in waking life. I scold my heart to settle,but it doesn't obey. I admonish myself to sit,to act normal, casual-and I just barely succeed. Stealing a series of surreptitious looks as I search through my backpack, taking in his square chin,wide generous lips,strong brow,defined cheekbones, and smooth brown skin-the exact same features as Cade. "You're the new girl,right?" He abandons his book,tilting his head in a way that causes his hair to stream over his shoulder,so glossy and inviting it takes all of my will not to lean across the table and touch it. I nod in reply,or at least I think I do.I can't be too sure.I'm too stricken by his gaze-the way it mirrors mine-trying to determine if he knows me, recognizes me,if he's surprised to find me here.Wishing Paloma had better prepared me-focused more on him and less on his brother. I force my gaze from his.Bang my knee hard against the table as I swivel in my seat.Feeling so odd and unsettled,I wish I'd picked another place to sit, though it's pretty clear no other table would have me. He buries his smile and returns to the book.Allowing a few minutes to pass,not nearly enough time for me to get a grip on myself,when he looks up and says, "Are you staring at me because you've seen my doppelganer roaming the halls,playing king of the cafeteria? Or because you need to borrow a pencil and you're too shy to ask?" I clear the lump from my throat, push the words past my lips when I say, "No one's ever accused me of being shy." A statement that,while steeped in truth, stands at direct odds with the way I feel now,sitting so close to him. "So I guess it's your twin-or doppelganer,as you say." I keep my voice light, as though I'm not at all affected by his presence,but the trill note at the end gives me away.Every part of me now vibrating with the most intense surge of energy-like I've been plugged into the wall and switched on-and it's all I can do to keep from grabbing hold of his shirt, demanding to know if he dreamed the dreams too. He nods,allowing an easy,cool smile to widen his lips. "We're identical," he says. "As I'm sure you've guessed. Though it's easy enough to tell us apart. For one thing,he keeps his hair short.For another-" "The eyes-" I blurt,regretting the words the instant they're out.From the look on his face,he has no idea what I'm talking about. "Yours are...kinder." My cheeks burn so hot I force myself to look away,as words of reproach stampede my brain. Why am I acting like such an inept loser? Why do I insist on embarrassing myself-in front of him-of all people? I have to pull it together.I have to remember who I am-what I am-and what I was born to do.Which is basically to crush him and his kind-or,at the very least,to temper the damage they do.

Some experts and thinkers, such as Nick Bostrom, warn that humankind is unlikely to suffer this degradation, because once artificial intelligence surpasses human intelligence, it might simply exterminate humankind. The AI would likely do so either for fear that humankind would turn against it and try to pull its plug, or in pursuit of some unfathomable goal of its own. For it would be extremely difficult for humans to control the motivation of a system smarter than themselves.

Standing up on her wobbly legs, Blue began to use all of the protective visualizations she’d been taught by her mother. She imagined herself inside an unbreakable glass ball; she could see out, but no on could touch her. She imagined white light piercing the stormy clouds, the roof, the darkness of Noah, finding Blue, armoring her. Then she pulled the plug on the battery that was Blue Sargent. The room went still. The papers settled. The light flickered once more and then strengthened.

Edmund stood up quickly and cupped my face in his hands. His thumb traced the track of my tear, wiping it away and sending shivers through me. “Are you crying?” I sighed. “Yes, I’m crying.” My voice didn’t sound right thanks to my plugged nose. “It’s been a really rough day and I’d just like to be left alone. So, can you go?” I feebly pushed against his chest. “Evie,” he whispered, my name a plea. “Please, tell me I’m not the reason you’re crying?” The way he looked at me made me want to bawl even more. From his face, I could tell the idea that he’d made me cry was torturous. I looked up at him, wanting him closer and hating myself for it. “Today was really crappy and yes, you’re part of that.” I pulled my face away from his hand. “But you’re far from the only reason.” He pulled me into his arms and kissed my forehead. “I’m so sorry. I never wanted to make you cry. I was a complete arse.” “Yes, you were.” He leaned me back and smiled softly. “Well, at least we can agree.

...knew how I got pregnant. I been knowing... I’m twelve now, I been knowing about that since I was five or six, maybe I always known about pussy and dick. I can’t remember not knowing.” “I wanna say I am somebody... I talk loud but still don’t exist.” “Sometimes I wish I was not alive. But I don’t know how to die. Ain’t no plug to pull out. ‘N no matter how bad I feel my heart don’t stop beating and my eyes open in the morning.” “November was my birthday, I don’t tell nobody so don’t nobody know. But I light a candle for myself. I glad Precious Jones was born.

All summers take me back to the sea. There in the long eelgrass, like birds' eggs waiting to be hatched, my brothers and sister and I sit, grasses higher than our heads, arms and legs like thicker versions of the grass waving in the wind, looking up at the blue sky. My mother is gathering food for dinner: clams and mussels and the sharply salty greens that grow by the shore. It is warm enough to lie here in the little silty puddles like bathwater left in the tub after the plug has been pulled. It is the beginning of July and we have two months to live out the long, nurturing days, watching the geese and the saltwater swans and the tides as they are today, slipping out, out, out as the moon pulls the other three seasons far away wherever it takes things. Out past the planets, far away from Uranus and the edge of our solar system, into the brilliantly lit dark where the things we don't know about yet reside. Out past my childhood, out past the ghosts, out past the breakwater of the stars. Like the silvery lace curtains of my bedroom being drawn from my window, letting in light, so the moon gently pulls back the layers of the year, leaving the best part open and free. So summer comes to me.

As a consequence of natural analgesic actions or as a result of the administration of drugs that interfere with body signaling (painkillers, anesthetics), the brain receives a distorted view of what the body state really is at the moment. We know that in situations of fear in which the brain chooses the running option rather than freezing, the brain stem disengages the part of the pain-transmission circuitry, a bit like pulling the plug. The periqueductal gray, which controls these responses, can also command the secretion of natural opioids and achieve precisely what taking an analgesic would achieve -- elimination of pain signals. In the strict sense, we are dealing here with a hallucination of the body because what the brain registers in its maps and the conscious mind feels do not correspond to the reality that might be perceived. Whenever we ingest molecules the have the power to modify the transmission or mapping of body signals, we play on this mechanism. Alcohol does it; so do analgesics and anesthetics, as well as countless drugs of abuse. It is patently clear that, other than out of curiousity, humans are drawn to such molecules because of their desire to generate feelings of well-being, feelings in which pain signals are obliterated and pleasure signals induced.

I was raised on the struggle of elders - iron collars, severed feet, the rifle of dirty Harriet, and down through the years, the Muslims and regal Malcolm. But mostly what I saw around me was rank dishonor: cable and Atari plugged into every room, juvenile parenting, niggers sporting kicks with price tags that looked like mortgage bills. The Conscious among us knew the whole race was going down, that we'd freed ourselves from slavery and Jim Crow but not the great shackling of minds. The hoppers had no picture of the larger world. We thought all our battles were homegrown and personal, but, like an evil breeze at our back, we felt invisible hands at work, like someone else was still tugging at levers and pulling strings.

The cheer that came from the couch the first time that the diminutive helicopter touched down intact with a full load of miniature people was just a little too loud. My father’s head snapped to the window to check whether he’d disturbed me, and he caught me dead in the eyes. I leaped into bed, pulled up the blanket, and lay perfectly still as my father’s heavy steps approached my room. He tapped on the window. “It’s past your bedtime, buddy. Are you still up?” I held my breath. Suddenly, he opened the window, reached into my bedroom, picked me up—blanket and all—and pulled me through into the den. It all happened so quickly, my feet never even touched the carpet. Before I knew it, I was sitting on my father’s lap as his copilot. I was too young and too excited to realize that the joystick he’d given me wasn’t plugged in. All that mattered was that I was flying alongside my father.

Well, here’s the thing. When you have spent your entire life so far – childhood and adulthood – feeling as though you’re continually circling the plug hole of not coping, you end up wanting to make sense of it. It really isn’t so hard to understand. When you’ve made multiple attempts to pull yourself together, and to tamp down your own experience of the world, but it’s still painfully evident that you’re different from the people around you; when that difference, or the process of trying to ignore it, frequently makes you sick; when you realise it will probably shorten your life because you drink too much to cope, or your blood pressure runs high, or you wonder how many more times you can withstand the feeling of crashing out of the mainstream world and falling through the cracks; then you might just begin to think that it would be convenient to name the thing that’s made everything so bloody hard.

the white light flowing from the projector is a metaphor of consciousness. In the awake state, the physical world acts like a roll of film creating patterns in the light. Your consciousness is filtered by the physical world and you are therefore aware of your surroundings. In the dream state, the roll of film is provided by whatever memories or experiences generate your dreams—an interesting topic in its own right, but not relevant here. In both cases, consciousness manifests the objects that are filtered from it—the images on the film in the analogy. In the case of deep sleep, the plug has been pulled on the projector; there is no white light. Russell argues that the fourth state of consciousness is that of the pure white light itself, not filtered or affected in any way by the objects of consciousness. This pure self-awareness is your ultimate consciousness. It is reported to be a state of peace and bliss—an awareness that the pure consciousness experienced is but a concentration point within a single universal consciousness.

It’s not a serious project,” Laurence said as they crossed Castro Street. “Milton doesn’t think the human race will still be here in a hundred years, much less a few thousand. This is just his way of hedging his bets. Or assuaging his conscience.” “It’s gotten me three free trips to Greenland,” Isobel said. “Honestly, I think Milton’s opinions depend on how many interns he’s killed today.” She half-winked, to indicate this was a joke and Milton killed no interns. During the dinner, Isobel talked more about her career transition, from rockets to Milton’s Ten Percent Project. “I used to dream about rockets.” Isobel scooped a corn chip into the communal pico de gallo. “Every single night, for months and months. After we pulled the plug on Nimble Aerospace. I had these weird dreams that there was a rocket launch going up any minute, and we’d misplaced the final telemetry. Or we were sending up a rocket, and it looked beautiful and proud shooting up into the air, and then it collided with a jumbo jet. Or worst of all was the dreams where nothing went wrong, rockets just soared for hours, and I sat on the ground watching with tears in my eyes.

Elwin set the tray of balms in her lap. “I’d recommend plugging your noses,” he told all of them as he lifted her bad arm and held it over the basin. “Psh, I want to bask in this!” Ro sucked in a long breath as Elwin untied the bands securing Sophie’s chain mail and unleashed a plume of something Sophie could only describe as weaponized morning breath. The strips of bandage underneath had gone from white to brownish yellow, and they made a horrible squish as Elwin slowly cut through them with narrow scissors. “Here we go!” Ro said, clapping as Elwin pulled the cocoon apart and . . . Keefe coughed. “Okay. That might even be too gross for me.” Sophie couldn’t decide which was worse: the way the ooze fizzled and foamed the second it hit the air, or the way it clung to her skin, dangling off her arm in long snotty threads instead of dripping into the basin. “Any chance I can get a bottle of that stuff?” Keefe asked. “I think my dad really needs to smell it.” “Nope. This is all going to Livvy,” Elwin told him. “Uh, if she’s going to use it for an elixir, I’m never taking one of her medicines ever again,” Fitz jumped in. “Me neither!” Sophie agreed.

Jenna is acting strange. Weeping, moping, even remarks tending toward belittlement Melmoth might tolerate (although he cannot think why; she is not his wife and even in human females PMS is a plague of the past) but when he caught her lying about Raquel—udderly wonderful, indeed—he knew the problem was serious. After sex, Melmoth powers her down. He retrieves her capsule from underground storage, a little abashed to be riding up with the oblong vessel in a lobby elevator where anyone might see. Locked vertical for easy transport, the capsule on its castors and titanium carriage stands higher than Melmoth is tall. He cannot help feeling that its translucent pink upper half and tapered conical roundness make it look like an erect penis. Arriving at penthouse level, he wheels it into his apartment. Once inside his private quarters, he positions it beside the hoverbed and enters a six-character alphanumeric open-sesame to spring the lid. On an interior panel, Melmoth touches a sensor for AutoRenew. Gold wands deploy from opposite ends and set up a zero-gravity field that levitates Jenna from the topsheet. As if by magic—to Melmoth it is magic—the inert form of his personal android companion floats four feet laterally and gentles to rest in a polymer cradle contoured to her default figure. Jenna is only a SmartBot. She does not breathe, blood does not run in her arteries and veins. She has no arteries or veins, nor a heart, nor anything in the way of organic tissue. She can be replaced in a day—she can be replaced right now. If Melmoth touches “Upgrade,” the capsule lid will seal and lock, all VirtuLinks to Jenna will break, and a courier from GlobalDigital will collect the unit from a cargo bay of Melmoth’s high-rise after delivering a new model to Melmoth himself. It distresses him, how easy replacement would be, as if Jenna were no more abiding than an oldentime car he might decide one morning to trade-in. Seeing her in the capsule is bad enough; the poor thing looks as if she is lying in her coffin. Melmoth does not select “Power Down” on his cerebral menu any more often than he must. Only to update her software does Melmoth resort to pulling Jenna’s plug. Updating, too, disturbs him. In authorizing it, he cannot pretend she is human. [pp. 90-91]

Mandal vs Mandir The V.P. Singh government was the biggest casualty of this confrontation. Within the BJP and its mentor, the RSS, the debate on whether or not to oppose V.P. Singh and OBC reservations reached a high pitch. Inder Malhotra | 981 words It was a blunder on V.P. Singh’s part to announce his acceptance of the Mandal Commission’s report recommending 27 per cent reservations in government jobs for what are called Other Backward Classes but are, in fact, specified castes — economically well-off, politically powerful but socially and educationally backward — in such hot haste. He knew that the issue was highly controversial, deeply emotive and potentially explosive, which it proved to be instantly. But his top priority was to outsmart his former deputy and present adversary, Devi Lal. He even annoyed those whose support “from outside” was sustaining him in power. BJP leaders were peeved that they were informed of what was afoot practically at the last minute in a terse telephone call. What annoyed them even more was that the prime minister’s decision would divide Hindu society. The BJP’s ranks demanded that the plug be pulled on V.P. Singh but the top leadership advised restraint, because it was also important to keep the Congress out of power. The party leadership was aware of the electoral clout of the OBCs, who added up to 52 per cent of the population. As for Rajiv Gandhi, he was totally and vehemently opposed to the Mandal Commission and its report. He eloquently condemned V.P. Singh’s decision when it was eventually discussed in Parliament. This can be better understood in the perspective of the Mandal Commission’s history. Having acquired wealth during the Green Revolution and political power through elections, the OBCs realised that they had little share in the country’s administrative apparatus, especially in the higher rungs of the bureaucracy. So they started clamouring for reservations in government jobs. Throughout the Congress rule until 1977, this demand fell on deaf ears. It was the Janata government, headed by Morarji Desai, that appointed the Mandal Commission in 1978. Ironically, by the time the commission submitted its report, the Janata was history and Indira Gandhi was back in power. She quietly consigned the document to the deep freeze. In Rajiv’s time, one of his cabinet ministers, Shiv Shanker, once asked about the Mandal report.

It was awful. It was three in the morning. And I finally said, “Chip, I’m not sleeping in this house.” We were broke. We couldn’t go to a hotel. There was no way we were gonna go knock on one of our parents’ doors at that time of night. That’s when I got an idea. We happened to have Chip’s parents’ old RV parked in a vacant lot a few blocks down. We had some of our things in there and had been using it basically as a storage unit until we moved in. “Let’s get in the RV. We’ll go find somewhere to plug it in, and we’ll have AC,” I said. As we stepped outside, the skies opened up. It started pouring rain. When we finally got into the RV, soaking wet, we pulled down the road a ways and Chip said, “I know where we can go.” It was raining so hard we could barely see through the windshield, and all of a sudden Chip turned the RV into a cemetery. “Why are you pulling in to a cemetery?” I asked him. “We’re not going to the cemetery,” Chip said. “It’s just next to a cemetery. There’s an RV park back here.” “Are you kidding me? Could this get any worse?” “Oh, quit it. You’re going to love it once I get this AC fired up.” Chip decided to go flying through the median between the two rows of RV parking, not realizing it was set up like a culvert for drainage and rain runoff. That RV bounced so hard that, had it not been for our seat belts, we would’ve both been catapulted through the roof of that vehicle. “What was that?!” “I don’t know,” Chip said. I tried to put it in reverse, and then forward, and then reverse again, and the thing just wouldn’t move. I hopped out to take a look and couldn’t believe it. There was a movie a few years ago where the main character gets his RV caught on this fulcrum and it’s sitting there teetering with both sets of wheels up in the air. Well, we sort of did the opposite. We went across this valley, and because the RV was so long, the butt end of it got stuck on the little hill behind us, and the front end got stuck on the little hill in front of us, and the wheels were just sort of hanging there in between. I crawled back into the RV soaking wet and gave Jo the bad news. We had no place to go, no place to plug in so we could run the AC; it was pouring rain so we couldn’t really walk anywhere to get help. And at that point I was just done. We wound up toughing it out and spending the first night after our honeymoon in a hot, old RV packed full of our belongings, suspended between two bumps in the road.

Switching on the ground-floor lights, she checked the gas jet and the main gas plug and poured water over the smoldering, half-buried charcoal in the brazier. She stood before the upright mirror in the four-and-a-half-mat room and held up her skirts. The bloodstains made it seem as if a bold, vivid pattern was printed across the lower half of her white kimono. When she sat down before the mirror, she was conscious of the dampness and coldness of her husband’s blood in the region of her thighs, and she shivered. Then, for a long while, she lingered over her toilet preparations. She applied the rouge generously to her cheeks, and her lips too she painted heavily. This was no longer make-up to please her husband. It was make-up for the world which she would leave behind, and there was a touch of the magnificent and the spectacular in her brushwork. When she rose, the mat before the mirror was wet with blood. Reiko was not concerned about this. (...) The lieutenant was lying on his face in a sea of blood. The point protruding from his neck seemed to have grown even more prominent than before. Reiko walked heedlessly across the blood. Sitting beside the lieutenant’s corpse, she stared intently at the face, which lay on one cheek on the mat. The eyes were opened wide, as if the lieutenant’s attention had been attracted by something. She raised the head, folding it in her sleeve, wiped the blood from the lips, and bestowed a last kiss. (...) Reiko sat herself on a spot about one foot distant from the lieutenant’s body. Drawing the dagger from her sash, she examined its dully gleaming blade intently, and held it to her tongue. The taste of the polished steel was slightly sweet. Reiko did not linger. When she thought how the pain which had previously opened such a gulf between herself and her dying husband was now to become a part of her own experience, she saw before her only the joy of herself entering a realm her husband had already made his own. In her husband’s agonized face there had been something inexplicable which she was seeing for the first time. Now she would solve that riddle. Reiko sensed that at last she too would be able to taste the true bitterness and sweetness of that great moral principle in which her husband believed. What had until now been tasted only faintly through her husband’s example she was about to savor directly with her own tongue. Reiko rested the point of the blade against the base of her throat. She thrust hard. The wound was only shallow. Her head blazed, and her hands shook uncontrollably. She gave the blade a strong pull sideways. A warm substance flooded into her mouth, and everything before her eyes reddened, in a vision of spouting blood. She gathered her strength and plunged the point of the blade deep into her throat.

A box sat on top of Jade’s pillows, wrapped in green paper with a white bow. He frowned slightly. Who would’ve left a gift on Jade’s bed? “You have a present.” “What?” Jade turned her head when he gestured toward the box. Confusion filled her eyes. She sat up and reached for the box. “I don’t understand.” Zach sat by her again and wrapped his arm around her waist. “Maybe there’s a card.” After searching beneath the large white bow, Jade pulled out a small envelope. Zach looked over her shoulder as she withdrew the card and read it aloud. “‘To Mom and Zach. Have fun tonight. Bre.’” Zach chuckled, both at Breanna’s card and at Jade’s blush. “Your daughter has quite a sense of humor.” “My daughter deserves to be spanked.” She lifted the box onto her lap. “I’m afraid to open it.” “Would you like me to? It’s addressed to both of us.” “I’m even more afraid for you to open it.” “Go ahead. It can’t be that bad.” “You don’t know my daughter.” Untying the bow, Jade raised the lid and pulled apart the bright green tissue paper. Several sex toys lay in the box. She gasped. “Oh, my God. I can’t believe she did this!” She started to push the tissue paper back over the contents, but Zach held her hand to stop her. “Wait. Let’s see what she bought.” “I am going to kill her, after I beat her.” Chuckling, Zach dug through the box, lifting the different items as he came to them. “Cock ring. Chocolate body paint. Stay-hard gel.” He looked into Jade’s eyes. “I don’t think I’ll need that tonight.” Her cheeks turned a deep pink. He dropped a kiss on her lips before beginning to explore again. “Anal beads. Ben-Wa balls. Fur-lined handcuffs. Nipple clamps. Lemon-flavored nipple cream.” His gaze dipped to her breasts. “Interesting.” She huffed out a breath. “Can we close the box now?” “Not yet. I like it when you blush.” Zach grinned when Jade scowled at him. “This is completely spoiling the mood.” “I won’t have any problem getting hard again.” “Zach!” Ignoring her outraged tone, he continued to sift through the items. “Lifelike dildo.” He held it up to eye level. “Close, but not quite as big as I am.” Jade covered her eyes with one hand. “I don’t believe this,” she muttered. “Butt plug. Wait, I’m wrong. It’s a vibrating butt plug. Very interesting. I hope you have batteries. Never mind. Breanna included several packages.” “Okay, that’s enough.” Jade tried to jerk the box out of his reach, but Zach held on to the side. “There’re only a couple more items. We might as well see what they are.” “I don’t care what they are.” “You might care about one of them.” Zach held up a large box of condoms. “Oh.” He turned the box in his hand. “I’m flattered, but I don’t think I’ll be able to use one hundred of these tonight.” “One hundred?” “All different types, sizes, and colors.” Jade laughed. “Oh, Bre.” She pushed her hair behind one ear. “What’s the last thing?” “Cherry-flavored lubricant. It looks like she thought of everything.” “You must think my daughter is crazy.” “I think your daughter loves you very much and wants you to be happy.” “That’s true. But we won’t use all this…stuff.” “Who says we won’t?

The door was still open, so I shut it and was returning to my desk when I braked. There was a backpack resting on the other side of my desk chair. It wasn’t mine. It wasn’t Missy’s. I was pretty sure it wasn’t Holly’s or the cousin’s. “Shit,” I muttered under my breath. “Huh?” she barked, her head swinging around to me. A quick glance confirmed what I already knew. She was drunk. “Nothing.” She pulled out one of her shirts, but it wasn’t her normal pajama top. She was really drunk. I picked up Shay’s bag and checked the contents to make sure it was his. It was. I saw his planner with his name scrawled at the top, so I zipped that bag and put it in the back of my closet. No one needed to go through it. I didn’t think Missy would, but I just never knew. Dropping into my chair, I picked up my phone to text Shay as Missy fell to the floor. I looked up to watch. I couldn’t not see this. I was tempted to video it, but I was being nice. For once. As Missy wrestled with her jeans and lifted them over her head to throw into her closet, I texted Shay. Me: You left your bag here. Missy let out a half-gurgled moan and a cry of frustration at the same time. She didn’t stand, instead crawling to the closet. She grabbed another pair of pants. Those weren’t her pajamas, either. As she pulled them on—or tried since her feet kept eluding the pants’ hole—my phone buzzed back. Coleman: Can I pick it up in the morning? I texted back. Me: When? Missy got one leg in. Success. I wanted to thrust my fist in the air for her. My phone buzzed again. Coleman: Early. My playbook is in there. I groaned. Me: When is early? I’m in college, Coleman. Sleeping in is mandatory. Coleman: Nine too early for you? I can come back to get it now. Nine was doable. Me: Let’s do an exchange. You bring me coffee, and I’ll meet you at the parking lot curb with your bag. Coleman: Done. Decaf okay? I glared at my phone. Me: Back to hating you. Coleman: Never stop that. The world’s equilibrium will be fucked up. I have to know what’s right and wrong. Don’t screw with my moral compass, Cute Ass. Oh, no! No way. Me: Third rule of what we don’t talk about. No nicknames unless they reconfirm our mutual dislike for each other. No Cute Ass. His response was immediate. Coleman: Cunt Ass? A second squeak from me. Me: NO! I could almost hear him laughing. Coleman: Relax. I know. Clarke’s Ass. That’s how you are in my phone. The tension left my shoulders. Me: See you in the morning. 9 sharp. Coleman: Night. I put my phone down, but then it buzzed once again. Coleman: Ass. I was struggling to wipe this stupid grin off my face. All was right again. I plugged my phone in, pulled my laptop back toward me, and sent a response to Gage’s email. I’ll sit with you, but only if we’re in the opposing team’s section. He’d be pissed, but that was the only way. I turned the computer off, and by then Missy was climbing up the ladder in a bright pink silk shirt. The buttons were left buttoned, and her pajama bottoms were a pair of corduroy khakis. I was pretty sure she didn’t brush her teeth, but before my head even hit the pillow, she was snoring

We need to be humble enough to recognize that unforeseen things can and do happen that are nobody’s fault. A good example of this occurred during the making of Toy Story 2. Earlier, when I described the evolution of that movie, I explained that our decision to overhaul the film so late in the game led to a meltdown of our workforce. This meltdown was the big unexpected event, and our response to it became part of our mythology. But about ten months before the reboot was ordered, in the winter of 1998, we’d been hit with a series of three smaller, random events—the first of which would threaten the future of Pixar. To understand this first event, you need to know that we rely on Unix and Linux machines to store the thousands of computer files that comprise all the shots of any given film. And on those machines, there is a command—/bin/rm -r -f *—that removes everything on the file system as fast as it can. Hearing that, you can probably anticipate what’s coming: Somehow, by accident, someone used this command on the drives where the Toy Story 2 files were kept. Not just some of the files, either. All of the data that made up the pictures, from objects to backgrounds, from lighting to shading, was dumped out of the system. First, Woody’s hat disappeared. Then his boots. Then he disappeared entirely. One by one, the other characters began to vanish, too: Buzz, Mr. Potato Head, Hamm, Rex. Whole sequences—poof!—were deleted from the drive. Oren Jacobs, one of the lead technical directors on the movie, remembers watching this occur in real time. At first, he couldn’t believe what he was seeing. Then, he was frantically dialing the phone to reach systems. “Pull out the plug on the Toy Story 2 master machine!” he screamed. When the guy on the other end asked, sensibly, why, Oren screamed louder: “Please, God, just pull it out as fast as you can!” The systems guy moved quickly, but still, two years of work—90 percent of the film—had been erased in a matter of seconds. An hour later, Oren and his boss, Galyn Susman, were in my office, trying to figure out what we would do next. “Don’t worry,” we all reassured each other. “We’ll restore the data from the backup system tonight. We’ll only lose half a day of work.” But then came random event number two: The backup system, we discovered, hadn’t been working correctly. The mechanism we had in place specifically to help us recover from data failures had itself failed. Toy Story 2 was gone and, at this point, the urge to panic was quite real. To reassemble the film would have taken thirty people a solid year. I remember the meeting when, as this devastating reality began to sink in, the company’s leaders gathered in a conference room to discuss our options—of which there seemed to be none. Then, about an hour into our discussion, Galyn Susman, the movie’s supervising technical director, remembered something: “Wait,” she said. “I might have a backup on my home computer.” About six months before, Galyn had had her second baby, which required that she spend more of her time working from home. To make that process more convenient, she’d set up a system that copied the entire film database to her home computer, automatically, once a week. This—our third random event—would be our salvation. Within a minute of her epiphany, Galyn and Oren were in her Volvo, speeding to her home in San Anselmo. They got her computer, wrapped it in blankets, and placed it carefully in the backseat. Then they drove in the slow lane all the way back to the office, where the machine was, as Oren describes it, “carried into Pixar like an Egyptian pharaoh.” Thanks to Galyn’s files, Woody was back—along with the rest of the movie.

Imagine a situation in which you informed a smart machine that you were going to pull its plug, and then changed your mind and gave it a reprieve. The machine would not change its outlook on life or vow to spend more time with its fellow machines. It would not grow emotionally or discover the value in loving and serving others.

No lectures about one-night stands?” “Of course not. As long as you use a condom, there’s nothing wrong with commitment-free pleasure. That being said, I wouldn’t advise using someone as a fuck-buddy. One of you always starts to have feelings. Expectations. Eventually someone gets hurt. So after the one-night stand, it’s better to pull the plug right away.

If You find Your imagination cannot stop itself from churning out the scripts of the Death Machines, pull its plug. Dismantle it. Reprogram it. Dream Daylight. Manufacture Daylight. We are the Magicians. Make Magic.

Military is Legal Terrorism (Ceasefire Sonnet) Any planet that confuses guns with gallantry is a planet of apes. Prioritizing military over education, we only build a world full of terrorists. Military is just legal terrorism, To fathom this you gotta be human. What do monkeys know of peace and love, When guns are their emblem of patriotism! We don't need civilian disarmament, We need absolute universal disarmament. Only a worldwide ban on firearms production, Can facilitate a paradigm of peaceful coexistence. Let's see which nation has the heart and backbone, To legislate absolute ban on firearms manufacture! Let's see who are the first civilized people, Let's see which nation is the first peacemaker! What's the point of one ceasefire, Let's pull the plug on all war. Let's disband all military, and siphon those funds to housing, education and healthcare.

The second I stepped foot outside of the Highbell Castle, something changed. Like a plug pulled out of its drain, a decade’s worth of water, water that’s engulfed me completely, began to lower. Gone was the strain of holding my head above it. There was no sucking in breaths, counting them, reminding myself I had air, that the crushing flood wouldn’t suffocate me as I treaded water.

Dear Halo, I see you. You are the light around the moon, and I know that you are the light above my head. You are a reflection of what and who I want to be. Therefore, tonight is the perfect time to reflect. There have been so many times, if not all the time, that the halation of light has spread in my life beyond its boundaries and has formed a fog everywhere. However, I have you right above my head to help me direct my path. I have changed. I have worked so hard on—me, Ember. I feel like when it comes to my mom, I am like water in the sink. My emotions go around and around in circles because she has drained me and taken everything from me. She is so good at pulling the plug on everything I’ve worked so hard to accomplish. I never gave away my power—it’s just that I am depleted. Right now, just for tonight and tomorrow, I am in hibernation as I unfold the memories that once hunted me. These memories have taken me to the highest point, and they most definitely have dragged me to my lowest point. They have dragged me so low to the point that my feelings and emotions are deeper than the sea. The name I use for Mom is—claustrophobia. She is the person I fear most, for Kace’s sake. Every time I see her, she closes me in—in a confined space in my heart and in my mind. Anxiety takes over me because I knew this day would come—that she would try to get custody of Kace. When I see her, I lose control... seeing her and thinking of her sends my mind to claustrophobia. The memories and remembrance of her close me in, and they trap me every single time—that is why I am in here. I have to control it. From this day forth, I am not surrounded by death. I am not mentally folding up in a ball. I am a parachute. I am free. I am flying like a bald eagle. I’m going in a direction where I cannot and will not carry dead weight. From now on, I am dealing with certain people with a long-handled spoon.

Quickly pushing and shoving to get out of the pool, was in a full-on panic. That is when Shy moved in for the kill- she was Jenny's best friend at the time. She grabbed Lizzy’s goodies, and bikini bottom and pulled the plug out by the sting, and the blood started to show in the water all pink. Shy dunked her and swam away, that is when Lizzy swam over to the diving board ass showing to get out, she claimed out and ran the length of the Olympic sized pool dripping and shaking to get around everyone, while the rest of us nearly died laughing at the sight of her new hair and a blood-covered vertical smile that was showing. That is how Shy became popular, she did Jenny’s dirty work for her. It reminded me of the time my parents took me to Kenny Wood when I was about in the fourth grade and made me get on one of the big coasters. My legs were not able to stop shaking and my feet got a tingling feeling on the bottom side of them like they were itching to get out of a pair of hot shoes: I couldn’t stop thinking about how easy it would be to fall out, how high up we were. After my mom got the picture, they took off on the ride, I started laughing and couldn’t stop at how scared yet thrilled I was. Standing on the high dive with Jenny got me exactly in the same way. It’s like I started craving more and more of that feeling too. It feels like that twenty-six seconds when you have a girly eruption and shaking because of it so good.

When you’ve got an arrow stuck in you, it’s sometimes best to just yank it out in one pull.” Actually, when you had an arrow in you, the best thing to do was leave it there until you could find a surgeon. Often it would plug the blood flow and keep you alive. It was probably best not to speak up and undermine the highprince’s metaphor,

You did not.” Robert gave a devious grin. “Oh, I did. That was the longest rotation of my life. I’ve pulled many, many things out of men’s asses.” Robert placed the butt plug next to the lube before turning back to the cubby.

For a few days, uncertain about what I should do next, I go for walks and watch television. The walking is good, but the television leaves me feeling hopeless and worthless. The vile psychopaths it wants me to enjoy cannot hold me in their spell. I can't bear to absorb those indelible images and pollute myself with hatred and violence. What doesn't depress me makes me feel like the cornered victim of a wealthy bore with their holiday movies, who sucks the vitality out of me. I pull the plug and take to my bed to read, cocooned again in poetry and wondering about a rebirth.

Tell me about data fiction.” “It’s what can happen if we’re so reliant on technology that we become completely dependent on things we can’t see. Therefore we can no longer judge for ourselves what’s true, what’s false, what’s accurate, what isn’t. In other words if reality is defined by software that does all the work for us then what if this software lies? What if everything we believe isn’t true but is a facade, a mirage? What if we go to war, pull the plug, make life-and-death decisions based on data fiction?

Asks, “If I weren’t already invested in this project, how much would I invest in it now?” Thinks, “What else could I do with this time or money if I pulled the plug now?” Comfortable with cutting losses

Viktor, inside my head, while I can still explain . . . Things are not moving forward. The world, that keeps moving forward, I understand that, I sense that. It won’t stop moving forward. But my brain is doubling back on itself. Even now, back I go. It feels like a bathtub, when someone pulls out the plug. Circles, circles, circles, and, every time around, something new, something not understood, and there’s me trying to scramble up the sides. And this is me at my best, this is when I still have a grasp.” “I

[During the honeymoon at a Catskill resort] A quiz was held during the afternoon, and guests were invited to volunteer. I raised my hand, of course, and became one of the contestants.... I was third in line, and when I rose to field my question in the first round, spontaneous laughter broke out from the audience. They had laughed at no one else. The trouble was that I looked anxious, and when I look anxious I look even more stupid than usual. The reason I was anxious was that I wanted to shine and feared I would not. I knew that I was neither handsome, self-assured, athletic, wealthy, nor sophisticated. The only thing I had going for me was that I was clever and I wanted to show off to Gertruded. And I was afraid of failing and spelling "weigh" "WIEGH." I ignored the laughter as best I could, and tried to concentrate. The master of ceremonies, trying not to grin and failing, said, "Use the word 'pitch' in sentences in such a way to demonstrate five different meanings of the word." (Heaven only knows where he got his questions.) More laughter, as I paused for a moment to collect my thoughts. I then said, "John pitched the pitch-covered ball as intensely as though he was fighting a pitched battled, while Mary singing in a high-pitched voice, pitched a tent." The laughter stopped as though someone had pulled a plug out of the socket. The master of ceremonies had me repeat it, counted the pitches, considered them, and pronounced me correct. Naturally by the time the quiz was over, I had won.... I noticed, though, that winning the quiz did not make me popular at the resort. Many people resented having wasted their laughter. The thought apparently was that I had no right to look stupid without being stupid; that, by doing so, I had cheated.

Another bullet hit Hajji Murad in the left side. He lay down in the ditch and again pulled some cotton wool out of his beshmet and plugged the wound. This wound in the side was fatal and he felt that he was dying. Memories and pictures succeeded one another with extraordinary rapidity in his imagination. now he saw the powerful Abu Nutsal Khan, dagger in hand and holding up his severed cheek as he rushed at his foe; then he saw the weak, bloodless old Vorontsov with his cunning white face, and heard his soft voice; then he saw his son Yusuf, his wife Sofiat, and then the pale, red-bearded face of his enemy Shamil with its half-closed eyes. All these images passed through his mind without evoking any feeling within him -- neither pity nor anger nor any kind of desire: everything seemed so insignificant in comparison with what was beginning, or had already begun, within him. Yet his strong body continued the thing that he had commenced. Gathering together his last strength he rose from behind the bank, fired his pistol at a man who was just running towards him, and hit him. The man fell. Then Hajji Murad got quite out of the ditch, and limping heavily went dagger in hand straight at the foe. Some shots cracked and he reeled and fell. Several militiamen with triumphant shrieks rushed towards the fallen body. But the body that seemed to be dead suddenly moved. First the uncovered, bleeding, shaven head rose; then the body with hands holding to the trunk of a tree. He seemed so terrible, that those who were running towards him stopped short. But suddenly a shudder passed through him, he staggered away from the tree and fell on his face, stretched out at full length like a thistle that had been mown down, and he moved no more. He did not move, but still he felt. When Hajji Aga, who was the first to reach him, struck him on the head with a large dagger, it seemed to Hajji Murad that someone was striking him with a hammer and he could not understand who was doing it or why. That was his last consciousness of any connection with his body. He felt nothing more and his enemies kicked and hacked at what had no longer anything in common with him. Hajji Aga placed his foot on the back of the corpse and with two blows cut off the head, and carefully -- not to soil his shoes with blood -- rolled it away with his foot. Crimson blood spurted from the arteries of the neck, and black blood flowed from the head, soaking the grass. Karganov and Hajji Aga and Akhmet Khan and all the militiamen gathered together -- like sportsmen round a slaughtered animal -- near the bodies of Hajji Murad and his men (Khanefi, Khan Mahoma, and Gamzalo they bound), and amid the powder-smoke which hung over the bushes they triumphed in their victory. the nightingales, that had hushed their songs while the firing lasted, now started their trills once more: first one quite close, then others in the distance. It was of this death that I was reminded by the crushed thistle in the midst of the ploughed field.

LET ME OUT! At some point your dog is bound to try barking or whining to get out of the crate. This is natural, it’s his way of trying to let you know that he wants out or desires your company. It is important however that you do not inadvertently reinforce the barking or whining by letting him out (or telling him “it’s okay”) while he’s making a fuss. Instead, ignore him until he quiets down on his own. If they’re not reinforced for making a fuss, most pups will learn to settle down and be quiet when left in their crate or sleeping room. If he starts barking relentlessly, and you’re beginning to pull your hair out by the roots, do whatever you need to do to cope (ear plugs? wine?) but don’t shout at him to “BE QUIET!” If you do, you are basically barking back, and as anyone with multiple dogs knows, barking is contagious! Even if your dog understands that you are irritated, you’ve still given him attention, and that, after all, is what he wanted. If you need to get him out of the kennel when he’s crying or barking, distract him with a noise (click of the tongue, tap on the wall, anything that gets his attention) to get him quiet for a moment. The instant that he is quiet you can let him out of the kennel. The one exception is if your pup is trying to tell you that he has to potty. If you think this might be the case, take him outside quietly, give him his “go potty” cue, treat and praise when he does and then put him right back in the crate.

This is fucking bullshit!” I slip my feet into my fluffy slippers, pull my robe closed, and march across the street. As I bang on the front door, it flings open. There are at least a half-dozen naked women traipsing across the room, gyrating on beefy athletes and doing God knows what. My eyes dart to the sound system, and since I’ve given into my inner psycho, I head straight to it and yank the plug out of the wall. The silence makes everyone look up, and I realize I’m staring at my brother, who looks horrified to see me. And then I realize why and turn away before I hurl. Because the girl down on her knees in front of him is obviously not praying. Jesus, I’m gonna need so much therapy one day. I clear my throat and address the crowd at large. “Some people have to work tomorrow, assholes. Can you keep it the fuck down? Stop terrorizing this neighborhood. The world does not revolve around you and your dumb football games!” I’m screeching. I can’t help it. I’m half-asleep and so hungry I’m nauseous. My eyelids flutter. God, I feel woozy. It’s almost like… Almost like… that time I passed out. Oh, shit. Am I going to pass out again? I can’t remember the last time I ate. Jason and I were supposed to get dinner, which turned into soggy nachos from the gas station, which I passed on. I blink. And blink again. Everything feels fuzzy, like it’s wrapped in film. I don’t even care that Jason is here, and he’s missing clothes. “Shit, Gabby. This isn’t what it looks like.” Ignoring him, I stumble to what I think is the front door, lean against it, and close my eyes. I want to tell Jason to leave me alone, except I’m afraid I’m going to drop to the floor if I let go of the doorframe. Then I hear the little cry. It sounds like a baby. And that’s when I know I must be losing my mind.

A man's tenure on earth is limited enough, but once the beetle's ticking begins there's no way to stop it; there's no plug to pull, no pendulum to stop, no switch that will restore the time you once thought you had.