Ride Image Quotes

Gazzy: "What does that mean?" (points to metal plaque warning to stay off the third rail that said Stay off the third rail!) Fang: "It means the third rail has seven hundred volts of direct current running through it. Touch it and you're human popcorn." “Okay,” I said. “Good tip. Everyone stay off the third rail. Then I shot Fang a look that said, Thank you for that lovely image. He almost grinned at me.

The fight unfolded like background noise. White noise. In the foreground, even with his ghastly pale face looking dead in my hands, my fingers clenching his ragged hair, all I could see was random images of Fang, not dead. Fang telling me stupid fart jokes from the dog crate next to mine at the school, trying to make me laugh. Fang asleep at Jeb's old house, and me jumping wildly on his bed to wake him up. Him pretending to be asleep. Me laughing when I "accidentally" kicked him where it counts. Him dumping me off the bed. Fang gagging on my first attempt at cooking dinner after Jeb disappeared. Him spitting out the mac and cheese. Me dumping the rest of the bowl on him in response. Fang on the beach, that first time he was badly injured. Me realizing how I felt about him. Fang kissing me. So close I couldn't even see his dark eyes anymore. The first time. The second time. The third. I could always remember each and every one of them. Would always remember them. Fang. Not. Dead.

Unfortunately, every time someone said “debriefing,” the entire flock had one image: someone’s tighty-whities disappearing in a flash. We were smothering our giggles, but it was getting harder. Coupled with the whole “naval this, and naval that,” with its undeniable belly-button connotations, we were essentially turning into a sugar-jacked, sleep-deprived flock of incoherent, silly, recombinant-DNA goofballs. This was not going to end well.

We feared that the music which had given us sustenance was in danger of spiritual starvation. We feared it losing its sense of purpose, we feared it falling into fattened hands, we feared it floundering in a mire of spectacle, finance, and vapid technical complexity. We would call forth in our minds the image of Paul Revere, riding through the American night, petitioning the people to wake up, to take up arms. We too would take up arms, the arms of our generation, the electric guitar and the microphone.

He sighed profoundly, and flung himself - there was a passion in his movements which deserves the word - on the earth at the foot of the oak tree. He loved, beneath all this summer transiency, to feel the earth's spine beneath him; for such he took the hard root of the oak tree to be; or, for image followed image, it was the back of a great horse that he was riding; or the deck of a tumbling ship - it was anything indeed, so long as it was hard, for he felt the need of something which he could attach his floating heart to; the heart that tugged at his side; the heart that seemed filled with spiced and amorous gales every evening about this time when he walked out. To the oak tree he tied it and as he lay there, gradually the flutter in and about him stilled itself; the little leaves hung, the deer stopped; the pale summer clouds stayed; his limbs grew heavy on the ground; and he lay so still that by degrees the deer stopped nearer and the rooks wheeled round him and the swallows dipped and circled and the dragonflies shot past, as if all the fertility and amorous activity of a summer's evening were woven web-like about his body.

With wine and being lost, with less and less of both: I rode through the snow, do you read me I rode God far--I rode God near, he sang, it was our last ride over the hurdled humans. They cowered when they heard us overhead, they wrote, they lied our neighing into one of their image-ridden languages.

He loved, beneath all this summer transiency, to feel the earth's spine beneath him; for such he took the hard root of the oak tree to be; or, for image followed image, it was the back of a great horse that he was riding, or the deck of a tumbling ship -- it was anything indeed, so long as it was hard, for he felt the need of something which he could attach his floating heart to; the heart that tugged at his side; the heart that seemed filled with spiced and amorous gales every evening about this time when he walked out.

Love, the great, the strong, the conquering god --- Love that subdues a world, and rides roughshod over principle, virtue, tradition, over home, kindred, and religion -- what cares he for the easy conquest of the pathetic being, who appeals to his sympathy? Love means equality -- the same height of heroism or of sin. When Love stoops to pity, he has ceased to soar in the boundless space, that rarefied atmosphere wherein man feels himself made at last truly in the image of God.

PLANETARIUM Thinking of Caroline Herschel (1750–1848) astronomer, sister of William; and others. A woman in the shape of a monster a monster in the shape of a woman the skies are full of them a woman ‘in the snow among the Clocks and instruments or measuring the ground with poles’ in her 98 years to discover 8 comets she whom the moon ruled like us levitating into the night sky riding the polished lenses Galaxies of women, there doing penance for impetuousness ribs chilled in those spaces of the mind An eye, ‘virile, precise and absolutely certain’ from the mad webs of Uranusborg encountering the NOVA every impulse of light exploding from the core as life flies out of us Tycho whispering at last ‘Let me not seem to have lived in vain’ What we see, we see and seeing is changing the light that shrivels a mountain and leaves a man alive Heartbeat of the pulsar heart sweating through my body The radio impulse pouring in from Taurus I am bombarded yet I stand I have been standing all my life in the direct path of a battery of signals the most accurately transmitted most untranslatable language in the universe I am a galactic cloud so deep so invo- luted that a light wave could take 15 years to travel through me And has taken I am an instrument in the shape of a woman trying to translate pulsations into images for the relief of the body and the reconstruction of the mind.

He was already fading. I knew that it wouldn't be long until he was just a vague image, however much I tried to cling onto his memory.

When I was little, my brother drew an image for me on the train ride home from the academy. It was a map of Internment, only instead of the real city, he'd drawn a castle for the clock tower. And the buildings were all different somehow. Mysterious. And right at the edge he drew a ladder that went down and disappeared into the clouds. It was the most spectacular thing I'd ever seen, and getting ready for my bath that night, I discovered it had fallen from a hole on my skirt pocket. I wanted to go out and look for it, but my mother told me the sweepers had already come. The paper would be collected with all the other forgotten-about things and it would be compressed and recycled into something new. I looked for it the next day, anyway, to no avail. I couldn't believe such a wonderful thing could be destroyed so simply. I learned that it could. Anything could be destroyed.

A KING WHO PLACED MIRRORS IN HIS PALACE There lived a king; his comeliness was such The world could not acclaim his charm too much. The world's wealth seemed a portion of his grace; It was a miracle to view his face. If he had rivals,then I know of none; The earth resounded with this paragon. When riding through his streets he did not fail To hide his features with a scarlet veil. Whoever scanned the veil would lose his head; Whoever spoke his name was left for dead, The tongue ripped from his mouth; whoever thrilled With passion for this king was quickly killed. A thousand for his love expired each day, And those who saw his face, in blank dismay Would rave and grieve and mourn their lives away- To die for love of that bewitching sight Was worth a hundred lives without his light. None could survive his absence patiently, None could endure this king's proximity- How strange it was that man could neither brook The presence nor the absence of his look! Since few could bear his sight, they were content To hear the king in sober argument, But while they listened they endure such pain As made them long to see their king again. The king commanded mirrors to be placed About the palace walls, and when he faced Their polished surfaces his image shone With mitigated splendour to the throne. If you would glimpse the beauty we revere Look in your heart-its image will appear. Make of your heart a looking-glass and see Reflected there the Friend's nobility; Your sovereign's glory will illuminate The palace where he reigns in proper state. Search for this king within your heart; His soul Reveals itself in atoms of the Whole. The multitude of forms that masquerade Throughout the world spring from the Simorgh's shade. If you catch sight of His magnificence It is His shadow that beguiles your glance; The Simorgh's shadow and Himself are one; Seek them together, twinned in unison. But you are lost in vague uncertainty... Pass beyond shadows to Reality. How can you reach the Simorgh's splendid court? First find its gateway, and the sun, long-sought, Erupts through clouds; when victory is won, Your sight knows nothing but the blinding sun.

At that sound the bent shape of the king sprang suddenly erect. Tall and proud he seemed again; and rising in his stirrups he cried in a loud voice, more clear than any there had ever heard a mortal man achieve before: Arise, arise, Riders of Theoden! Fell deeds awake: fire and slaughter! spear shall be shaken, shield be splintered, a sword-day, a red day, ere the sun rises! Ride now, ride now! Ride to Gondor! With that he seized a great horn from Guthlaf his banner-bearer, and he blew such a blast upon it that it burst asunder. And straightway all the horns in the host were lifted up in music, and the blowing of the horns of Rohan in that hour was like a storm upon the plain and a thunder in the mountains. Ride now, ride now! Ride to Gondor! Suddenly the king cried to Snowmane and the horse sprang away. Behind him his banner blew in the wind, white horse upon a field of green, but he outpaced it. After him thundered the knights of his house, but he was ever before them. Eomer rode there, the white horsetail on his helm floating in his speed, and the front of the first eored roared like a breaker foaming to the shore, but Theoden could not be overtaken. Fey he seemed, or the battle-fury of his fathers ran like new fire in his veins, and he was borne up on Snowmane like a god of old, even as Orome the Great in the battle of the Valar when the world was young. his golden shield was uncovered, and lo! it shone like an image of the Sun, and the grass flamed into green about the white feet of his steed. For morning came, morning and a wind from the sea; and darkness was removed, and the hosts of Mordor wailed, and terror took them, and they fled, and died, and the hoofs of wrath rode over them. And then all the host of Rohan burst into song, and they sang as they slew, for the joy of battle was on them, and the sound of their singing that was fair and terrible came even to the City.

I have memories, but I don’t know if they are really mine or if I’ve just seen so many pictures. I think that I remember riding on his sailboat with him, and playing under his desk in the Oval Office, but those images are everywhere, so do I really remember them or just imagine how it all happened?

How the holy and the profane mix in the light of day and at the end of life is sometimes the most beautiful thing in this world and a compassionate entry into the next. After failure and defeat, a concentration upon certain beauties, though forever lost and unretrievable, can lift the wounded past roundedness and the dying past dying, protecting them with an image, still and bright, that will ride with them on their long ride, never to fade and never to retreat.

I’ll never understand why men assume we want images of their penis. I want to ride it, maybe lick it, but not because it’s nice to look at.

The most exciting roads I’ve ever traversed, the best meals I’ve ever eaten and the most wonderful accommodations I’ve ever stayed in were discovered during the ride, not beforehand.

The theme of the book is simple: a man is dying: you feel him sinking throughout the book; his thought and his memories pervade the whole with greater or lesser distinction (like the swell and fall of uneven breathing), now rolling up this image, now that, letting it ride in the wind, or even tossing it out on the shore, where it seems to move and live for a minute on its own and presently is drawn back again by grey seas where it sinks or is strangely transfigured.

Kind of what?" Gordon challenged, cutting his eyes to Kevin even as a mental image of himself in the back of Aiden's truck popped into his mind. Shredded jeans in a ball on the floorboard and riding the Outlaw with the athleticism of an Olympic gold medalist in ass fucking.

Lollipops and raindrops Sunflowers and sun-kissed daisies Rolling surf and raging sea Sailing ships and submarines Old Glory and “purple mountain’s majesty” Screaming guitar and lilting rhyme Flight of fancy and high-steppin’ dances Set free my mind to wander… Imagine the ant’s marching journeys. Fly, in my mind’s eye, on butterfly wings. Roam the distant depths of space. Unfurl tall sails and cross the ocean. Pictures made just to enthrall Creating images from my truth Painting hopes and dreams on my canvas Capturing, through my lens, the ephemeral Let me ruminate ‘pon sensual darkness… Tremble o’er Hollywood’s fluttering Gothics… Ride the edge of my seat with the hero… Weep with the heroine’s desperation. Yet… more than all these things… Give me words spun out masterfully… Terms set out in meter and rhyme… Phrases bent to rattle the soul… Prose that always miraculously inspires me! The trill runs up my spine, as I recall… A touch… a caress…a whispered kiss… Ebony eyes embracing my soul… Two souls united in beat of hearts. A butterfly flutter in my womb My lover’s wonder o’er my swelling The testament of our love given life Newly laid in my lover’s arms Luminous, sweet ebony eyes Just so much like his father’s A gaze of wonder and contentment From my babe at mother’s breast Words of the Divine set down for me Faith, Hope, Love, and Charity Grace, Mercy, and undeserved Salvation “My Shepherd will supply my need” These are the things that inspire me.

There is no greater wonder than to range The starry heights, to leave the earth’s dull regions, To ride the clouds, to stand on Atlas’ shoulders, And see, far off, far down, the little figures Wandering here and there, devoid of reason, Anxious, in fear of death, and so advise them, And so make fate an open book… …Full sail, I voyage Over the boundless ocean, and I tell you Nothing is permanent in all the world. All things are fluid; every image forms, Wandering through change. Time is itself a river In constant movement, and the hours flow by Like water, wave on wave, pursued, pursuing, Forever fugitive, forever new. That which has been, is not; that which was not, Begins to be; motion and moment always In process of renewal… Not even the so-called elements are constant… Nothing remains the same: the great renewer, Nature, makes form from form, and, oh, believe me That nothing ever dies….

She surrounded him. Wet, hot. Indescribable. Spasms rocked her, and she lost herself in their rhythm, riding him so fast she was nothing but a blur. But as much as he wished it would never end, no times tables and no images of grungy linoleum floors could keep the flood of her orgasm from inciting his own.

He felt a tremor of fear at the image, and a disquieting thought... ran through his mind almost too quickly to read and was gone. But...but it wasn't all disquiet, was it? No. It was desire as well... The desire to go fast, to feel the wind race pass you without knowing if you were racing toward or running away from, to just go. To fly. Disquiet and desire. All the difference between the world and want---the difference between being an adult who counted the cost and a child who just got on it and went, for instance. All the world between. Yet not that much difference at all. Bedfellows, really. The way you felt it when the roller coaster car approached the top of the first steep grade, are the ride really begins. Disquiet and desire. What you want and what you're scared to try for. Where you've been and where you want to go. Something in a rock-and-roll song about wanting the girl, the car, the place to stand and be. Oh please God can you dig it.

We imagined ourselves as the Sons of Liberty with a mission to preserve, protect, and project the revolutionary spirit of rock and roll. We feared that the music which had given us sustenance was in danger of spiritual starvation. We feared it losing its sense of purpose, we feared it falling into fattened hands, we feared it floundering in a mire of spectacle, finance, and vapid technical complexity. We would call forth in our minds the image of Paul Revere, riding through the American night, petitioning the people to wake up, to take up arms. We too would take up arms, the arms of our generation, the electric guitar and the microphone.

In Tibet, we have a traditional image, the windhorse, which represents a balanced relationship between the wind and the mind. The horse represents wind and movement. On its saddle rides a precious jewel. That jewel is our mind. A jewel is a stone that is clear and reflects light. There is a solid, earthly element to it. You can pick it up in your hand, and at the same time you can see through it. These qualities represent the mind: it is both tangible and translucent. The mind is capable of the highest wisdom. It can experience love and compassion, as well as anger. It can understand history, philosophy, and mathematics—and also remember what’s on the grocery list. The mind is truly like a wish-fulfilling jewel. With an untrained mind, the thought process is said to be like a wild and blind horse: erratic and out of control. We experience the mind as moving all the time—suddenly darting off, thinking about one thing and another, being happy, being sad. If we haven’t trained our mind, the wild horse takes us wherever it wants to go. It’s not carrying a jewel on its back—it’s carrying an impaired rider. The horse itself is crazy, so it is quite a bizarre scene. By observing our own mind in meditation, we can see this dynamic at work. Especially in the beginning stages of meditation, we find it extremely challenging to control our mind. Even if we wish to control it, we have very little power to do so, like the infirm rider. We want to focus on the breathing, but the mind keeps darting off unexpectedly. That is the wild horse. The process of meditation is taming the horse so that it is in our control, while making the mind an expert rider.

When you realize that people treat you according to how they see themselves rather than how you really are, you are less likely to be affected by their behavior. Your self-image will reflect who you are, not how you’re treated by others. You will not be riding an emotional roller roaster. This type of stability will have a tremendous effect on how you feel toward and deal with others. The key to successful relationships really gets down to responsibility. I am responsible for how I treat others. I may not be responsible for how they treat me, but I am responsible for my reaction to those who are difficult. I can’t choose how you’ll treat me, but I can choose how I will respond to you.

I must have had a dozen rides that evening. They blear into a nightmare, the one scarcely distinguishable from the other. It quickly became obvious why they picked me up. All but two picked me up the way they would pick up a pornographic photograph or book - except that this was verbal pornography. With a Negro, they assumed they need give no semblance of self-respect or respectability. The visual element entered into it. In a car at night visibility is reduced. A man will reveal himself in the dark, which gives the illusion of anonymity, more than he will in the bright light. Some were shamelessly open, some shamelessly subtle. All showed morbid curiosity about the sexual life of the Negro, and all had, at base, the same stereotyped image of the Negro as an inexhaustible sex-machine with oversized genitals and a vast store of experiences, immensely varied. They appeared to think that the Negro has done all of those “special” things they themselves have never dared to do. They carried the conversations into depths of depravity.

A hundred years ago, the Irish had been the immigrant boogeymen. The popular image of the leprechaun began life as a xenophobic political cartoon. Once, nobody thought a Catholic could be president. Then Kennedy came along. From time to time, we liked to pat ourselves on the back and think we were done with hate. Recent history had shown us it didn’t take much to awaken it, though.

Furthermore, I refuse to be affected by these cheap theatrics!" She gestured to the boiling sky. "Gor!" Shelton covered his eyes with one hand. Dougal instantly went from mad to furious, and the clouds rumbled to life. Yet in that instant, he realized that this tiny little bit of a woman had just reduced centuries of a dramatic and secretive curse to "cheap theatrics." He didn't know whether to rage or laugh, but somehow, looking up into her amazing blue eyes, laughter was beginning to win. "Furthermore," she continued in high dudgeon, "I won't be cowed by a few damned drops of rain!" Shelton groaned loudly. "Law,here it comes now." But it didn't. Instead, a chuckle rippled through Dougal. Sophia appeared outraged. "Are you laughing at me?" "No,sweetheart. I'm laughing at us. We cannot even ride from the field to the house without racing. We're doomed to challenge each other forever,and if we don't have a care, my temper will try the two of us like sausages over a spit." Her lips quivered in response. "I don't particularly care for that image." "I haven't time for elegance, my love. It is getting ready to rain, so sausages are all you'll get.

Sometimes while I ride the subway I try to look at each person and imagine what they look like to someone who is totally in love with them. I think everyone has had someone look at them that way, whether it was a lover, or a parent, or a friend, whether they know it or not. It's a wonderful thing, to look at someone to whom I would never be attracted and think about what looking at them feels like to someone who is devouring every part of their image, who has invisible strings that are connected to this person tied to every part of their body. I think this fun pastime is a way of cultivating compassion. It feels good to think about people that way, and to use that part of my mind that I think is traditionally reserved for a tiny portion of people I'll meet in my life to appreciate the general public. I wish I thought about people like this more often. I think it's the opposite of what our culture teaches us to do. We prefer to pick people apart to find their flaws. Cultivating these feelings of love or appreciation for random people, and even for people I don't like, makes me a more forgiving and appreciative person toward myself and people I love. Also, it's just a really excellent pastime.

But now I speculate re the ants' invisible organ of aggregate thought... if, in a city park of broad reaches, winding paths, roadways, and lakes, you can imagine seeing on a warm and sunny Sunday afternoon the random and unpredictable movement of great numbers of human beings in the same way... if you watch one person, one couple, one family, a child, you can assure yourself of the integrity of the individual will and not be able to divine what the next moment will bring. But when the masses are celebrating a beautiful day in the park in a prescribed circulation of activities, the wider lens of thought reveals nothing errant, nothing inconstant or unnatural to the occasion. And if someone acts in a mutant un-park manner, alarms go off, the unpredictable element, a purse snatcher, a gun wielder, is isolated, surrounded, ejected, carried off as waste. So that while we are individually and privately dyssynchronous, moving in different ways, for different purposes, in different directions, we may at the same time comprise, however blindly, the pulsing communicating cells of an urban over-brain. The intent of this organ is to enjoy an afternoon in the park, as each of us street-grimy urbanites loves to do. In the backs of our minds when we gather for such days, do we know this? How much of our desire to use the park depends on the desires of others to do the same? How much of the idea of a park is in the genetic invitation on nice days to reflect our massive neuromorphology? There is no central control mechanism telling us when and how to use the park. That is up to us. But when we do, our behavior there is reflective, we can see more of who we are because of the open space accorded to us, and it is possible that it takes such open space to realize in simple form the ordinary identity we have as one multicellular culture of thought that is always there, even when, in the comparative blindness of our personal selfhood, we are flowing through the streets at night or riding under them, simultaneously, as synaptic impulses in the metropolitan brain. Is this a stretch? But think of the contingent human mind, how fast it snaps onto the given subject, how easily it is introduced to an idea, an image that it had not dreamt of thinking of a millisecond before... Think of how the first line of a story yokes the mind into a place, a time, in the time it takes to read it. How you can turn on the radio and suddenly be in the news, and hear it and know it as your own mind's possession in the moment's firing of a neuron. How when you hear a familiar song your mind adopts its attitudinal response to life before the end of the first bar. How the opening credits of a movie provide the parameters of your emotional life for its ensuing two hours... How all experience is instantaneous and instantaneously felt, in the nature of ordinary mind-filling revelation. The permeable mind, contingently disposed for invasion, can be totally overrun and occupied by all the characteristics of the world, by everything that is the case, and by the thoughts and propositions of all other minds considering everything that is the case... as instantly and involuntarily as the eye fills with the objects that pass into its line of vision.

It’s all about having the right image of yourself, the correct one. The one that you truly are, the one that wants to be successful. If you see that true image of yourself, you will grow into it. If you see a negative image, that’s what you’ll grow into. It’s time you accept that you’re made for greatness, and you need to put on your seatbelt because your life is going to be one wild ride. One amazing storybook ride.

Looking at international economic life brings to mind the ancient image of the world riding on the back of a turtle—only in reality, the turtle is a woman. She inches along, laboring just beneath the level of economic visibility, often blaming herself for not being able to bear more weight. Occasionally, she retreats into her shell, as if withdrawal were the only form of rebellion. But only when she upsets its balance will the world roll off her back.

The images on the covers of previous Little House books, drawn by Garth Williams in the editions I owned, had been of Laura in motion, front and center: gamboling down a hillside, riding a horse barefoot, having a snowball fight. Here she was, stationary and solidly shod, beside her husband; the baby she held in her arms was the most lively figure in the scene. Laura’s story was coming to a close. The tale that was worth telling about her was finished once she married.

In two days they began to come upon bones and cast-off apparel. They saw halfburied skeletons of mules with the bones so white and polished they seemed incandescent even in that blazing heat and they saw panniers and packsaddles and the bones of men and they saw a mule entire, the dried and blackened carcass hard as iron. They rode on. The white noon saw them through the waste like a ghost army, so pale they were with dust, like shades of figures erased upon a board. The wolves loped paler yet and grouped and skittered and lifted their lean snouts on the air. At night the horses were fed by hand from sacks of meal and watered from buckets. There was no more sickness. The survivors lay quietly in that cratered void and watched the whitehot stars go rifling down the dark. Or slept with their alien hearts beating in the sand like pilgrims exhausted upon the face of the planet Anareta, clutched to a namelessness wheeling in the night. They moved on and the iron of the wagontires grew polished bright as chrome in the pumice. To the south the blue cordilleras stood footed in their paler image on the sand like reflections in a lake and there were no wolves now. They took to riding by night, silent jornadas save for the trundling of the wagons and the wheeze of the animals. Under the moonlight a strange party of elders with the white dust thick on their moustaches and their eyebrows. They moved on and the stars jostled and arced across the firmament and died beyond the inkblack mountains. They came to know the nightskies well. Western eyes that read more geometric constructions than those names given by the ancients. Tethered to the polestar they rode the Dipper round while Orion rose in the southwest like a great electric kite. The sand lay blue in the moonlight and the iron tires of the wagons rolled among the shapes of the riders in gleaming hoops that veered and wheeled woundedly and vaguely navigational like slender astrolabes and the polished shoes of the horses kept hasping up like a myriad of eyes winking across the desert floor. They watched storms out there so distant they could not be heard, the silent lightning flaring sheetwise and the thin black spine of the mountain chain fluttering and sucked away again in the dark. They saw wild horses racing on the plain, pounding their shadows down the night and leaving in the moonlight a vaporous dust like the palest stain of their passing.

At some indefinite passage in night's sonorous score, it also came to her that she would be safe, that something, perhaps only her linearly fading drunkenness, would protect her. The city was hers, as, made up and sleeked so with the customary words and images (cosmopolitan, culture, cable cars) it had not been before: she had safe-passage tonight to its far blood's branchings, be they capillaries too small for more than peering into, or vessels mashed together in shameless municipal hickeys, out on the skin for all but tourists to see. Nothing of the night's could touch her; nothing did. The repetition of symbols was to be enough, without trauma as well perhaps to attenuate it or even jar it altogether loose from her memory. She was meant to remember. She faced that possibility as she might the toy street from a high balcony, roller-coaster ride, feeding-time among the beasts in a zoo—any death-wish that can be consummated by some minimum gesture. She touched the edge of its voluptuous field, knowing it would be lovely beyond dreams simply to submit to it; that not gravity's pull, laws of ballistics, feral ravening, promised more delight. She tested it, shivering: I am meant to remember. Each clue that comes is supposed to have its own clarity, its fine chances for permanence. But then she wondered if the gemlike "clues" were only some kind of compensation. To make up for her having lost the direct, epileptic Word, the cry that might abolish the night.

My ignorance about the quotidian aspects of Iranian life was unsettling in one sense but in another way it was refreshing not to have textbook images or holiday brochure promo material to raise expectations – and the inevitable disappointment when it didn’t materialise. It made me realise, even in our world of information overload, how little of daily Iranian life is known outside its borders, and how rare it is to be able to arrive in a country with the sensation of an utterly blank canvas waiting to be filled.

There’s a book I had to read in college that I’ve just picked up again called Psycho-Cybernetics. It’s all about having the right image of yourself, the correct one. The one that you truly are, the one that wants to be successful. If you see that true image of yourself, you will grow into it. If you see a negative image, that’s what you’ll grow into. It’s time you accept that you’re made for greatness, and you need to put on your seatbelt because your life is going to be one wild ride. One amazing storybook ride.

The word “habit” originally meant a garment, or clothing. We still speak of riding habits, and habiliments. This gives us an insight into the true nature of habit. Our habits are literally garments worn by our personalities. They are not accidental, or happenstance. We have them because they fit us. They are consistent with our self-image and our entire personality pattern. When we consciously and deliberately develop new and better habits, our self-image tends to outgrow the old habits and grow into the new pattern.

The head of the initiative was the former CEO of a website that served as a repository of humorous images and videos optimized for social media virality—mostly cats doing improbable things, like riding robotic vacuum cleaners and getting stuck in hamburger buns. The website had raised nearly forty-two million dollars in venture capital. He would be working alongside another entrepreneur, a woman who had founded an on-demand housekeeping platform that had shut down amid a spate of lawsuits. The audacity was breathtaking.

Hey, yourself.” I beamed at the cheerleading squad's captain and then leaned down to whisper to La La. “What’s her name again?” “Jackie.” La La slung her jean satchel on her right shoulder and exhaled noisily. “I can’t wait until you get out of your Shapeshifter horny phase.” “The proper name is Season.” I drank in Jackie’s image as she jumped around, doing a cheer. Those round melons bounced with each movement. “And it usually takes Shifters seven to ten years to mature out of it, so buckle up and enjoy the ride.” La La snorted.

Whence came Natohk?” rose the Shemite’s vibrant whisper. “Out of the desert on a night when the world was blind and wild with mad clouds driven in frenzied flight across the shuddering stars, and the howling of the wind was mingled with the shrieking of the spirits of the wastes. Vampires were abroad that night, witches rode naked on the wind, and werewolves howled across the wilderness. On a black camel he came, riding like the wind, and an unholy fire played about him, the cloven tracks of the camel glowed in the darkness. When Natohk dismounted before Set’s shrine by the oasis of Aphaka, the beast swept into the night and vanished. And I have talked with tribesmen who swore that it suddenly spread gigantic wings and rushed upward into the clouds, leaving a trail of fire behind it. No man has seen that camel since that night, but a black brutish man-like shape shambles to Natohk’s tent and gibbers to him in the blackness before dawn. I will tell you, Conan, Natohk is – look, I will show you an image of what I saw that day by Shushan when the wind blew aside his veil!

gravity didn’t even exist. As if the thought of slipping off that narrow seat and plummeting to the ground never entered any of their minds. Growing up, she’d had a hard enough time riding the chair lift during her family’s annual Christmas vacations to Colorado, but after doing her residency in a hospital emergency room, she had an all-too-vivid image in her head of exactly what the result of such a fall would look like. How had she let Maddy and Amy talk her into this? Of course, sitting in a bookstore coffee shop with her friends last spring, the thought of facing her fear of heights

In conclusion, I return to Einstein. If we find a planet in the Alpha Centauri system, its image, captured by a camera travelling at a fifth of light speed, will be slightly distorted due to the effects of special relativity. It would be the first time a spacecraft has flown fast enough to see such effects. In fact, Einstein’s theory is central to the whole mission. Without it we would have neither lasers nor the ability to perform the calculations necessary for guidance, imaging and data transmission over twenty-five trillion miles at a fifth of light speed. We can see a pathway between that sixteen-year-old boy dreaming of riding on a light beam and our own dream, which we are planning to turn into a reality, of riding our own light beam to the stars. We are standing at the threshold of a new era. Human colonisation on other planets is no longer science fiction. It can be science fact. The human race has existed as a separate species for about two million years. Civilisation began about 10,000 years ago, and the rate of development has been steadily increasing. If humanity is to continue for another million years, our future lies in boldly going where no one else has gone before. I hope for the best. I have to. We have no other option.

she whispers into my truculence and I succumb to that thing called faith that blind old hag who left her brothers and sisters under the overpass she strokes her way into my soul a divining rod slips from the heavens a greasy old senior citizen with stale coffee breath and a proverb for any situation she recounts the transgressions from a lifetime ago with a glassine vision the images move in a circular sway, dashing from light to dark truisms to falsehoods this is a woman, my friend, with whom you can ride the river and gaze at the mountain this is a woman with a heart fired by the very furnace of Hell yet beats with the sonnets of God

He sighed profoundly, and flung himself—there was a passion in his movements which deserves the word—on the earth at the foot of the oak tree. He loved, beneath all this summer transiency, to feel the earth’s spine beneath him; for such he took the hard root of the oak tree to be; or, for image followed image, it was the back of a great horse that he was riding; or the deck of a tumbling ship—it was anything indeed, so long as it was hard, for he felt the need of something which he could attach his floating heart to; the heart that tugged at his side; the heart that seemed filled with spiced and amorous gales every evening about this time when he walked out.

When Sally stopped crying, she found herself alone, the cold draft of the window at her neck, and on both sides, the rows of doors went on and on, diminishing to nothing, the end. 'What fun it is to ride and sing a sleighing song tonight, oh.' What glories. Mathilde came. And though she appeared to be the... same sweet girl Sally had been afraid of, she was not. Sally saw the flint in her. Mathilde can save Lotto from his own laziness, Sally thought. But here they were, a year later, and he was still ordinary. The chorus caught in her throat. A stranger hurrying as fast as he could over the icy sidewalks looked in. He saw a circle of singing people bathed in the clean, white light from a tree, and his heart did a soumersault. And the image stayed with him, it merged with him even as he came home to his own children, who were already asleep in their beds, to his wife crossly putting together the tricycle without the screwdriver he'd run out to borrow. It remained long after his children ripped open their gifts and abandoned their toys and puddles of paper and grew too old for them and left their house and parents and childhoods, so that he and his wife gaped at each other in bewilderment as to how it had happened so terribly swiftly. All those years, the singers in the soft light in the basement apartment crystalized in his mind, became the very idea of what happiness should look like.

Never a fan of riding horses, I still appreciated its significance in what little philosophy I remember from school. The allegoric image of a charioteer struggling to maintain control of a white and a black horse pursuing separate courses from Plato’s Phaedrus always kept me wondering whether my own passions and desires could be kept in check by a higher reasoning function. I suppose I keep the black horse on my wall as a reminder to pay attention to the demands of my irrational side, but with an eye of keeping it from wresting control of my life. Of course, it keeps me in a constant state of struggle where some days, like the time with Bold and his family, I feel each horse gaining primacy over the course of a single hour.

A century ago, Albert Einstein revolutionised our understanding of space, time, energy and matter. We are still finding awesome confirmations of his predictions, like the gravitational waves observed in 2016 by the LIGO experiment. When I think about ingenuity, Einstein springs to mind. Where did his ingenious ideas come from? A blend of qualities, perhaps: intuition, originality, brilliance. Einstein had the ability to look beyond the surface to reveal the underlying structure. He was undaunted by common sense, the idea that things must be the way they seemed. He had the courage to pursue ideas that seemed absurd to others. And this set him free to be ingenious, a genius of his time and every other. A key element for Einstein was imagination. Many of his discoveries came from his ability to reimagine the universe through thought experiments. At the age of sixteen, when he visualised riding on a beam of light, he realised that from this vantage light would appear as a frozen wave. That image ultimately led to the theory of special relativity. One hundred years later, physicists know far more about the universe than Einstein did. Now we have greater tools for discovery, such as particle accelerators, supercomputers, space telescopes and experiments such as the LIGO lab’s work on gravitational waves. Yet imagination remains our most powerful attribute. With it, we can roam anywhere in space and time. We can witness nature’s most exotic phenomena while driving in a car, snoozing in bed or pretending to listen to someone boring at a party.

We imagined ourselves as the Sons of Liberty with a mission to preserve, protect, and project the revolutionary spirit of rock and roll. We feared that the music which had given us sustenance was in danger of spiritual starvation. We feared it losing its sense of purpose, we feared it falling into fattened hands, we feared it floundering in a mire of spectacle, finance, and vapid technical complexity. We would call forth in our minds the image of Paul Revere, riding through the American night, petitioning the people to wake up, to take up arms. We too would take up arms, the arms of our generation, the electric guitar and the microphone. CBGB was the ideal place to sound a clarion call. It was a club on the street of the downtrodden that drew a strange breed who welcomed artists yet unsung. The only thing Hilly Krystal required

Silverstein, one of those leading the charge toward more far-ranging flights than Mercury, had been looking for a suitable name for a payload for the Saturn rockets. None suggested by his associates seemed appropriate. One day, while consulting a book on mythology, Silverstein found what he wanted. He later said, “I thought the image of the god Apollo riding his chariot across the sun gave the best representation of the grand scale of the proposed program.” Occasionally he asked his Headquarters colleagues for their opinions. When no one objected, the chariot driver Apollo (according to ancient Greek myths, the god of music, prophecy, medicine, light, and progress became the name of the proposed circumlunar spaceships. At the opening of the conference on 28 July 1960, Dryden announced that “the next spacecraft beyond Mercury will be called Apollo.

He sighed profoundly, and flung himself — there was a passion in his movements which deserves the word — on the earth at the foot of the oak tree. He loved, beneath all this summer transiency, to feel the earth’s spine beneath him; for such he took the hard root of the oak tree to be; or, for image followed image, it was the back of a great horse that he was riding, or the deck of a tumbling ship — it was anything indeed, so long as it was hard, for he felt the need of something which he could attach his floating heart to; the heart that tugged at his side; the heart that seemed filled with spiced and amorous gales every evening about this time when he walked out. To the oak tree he tied it and as he lay there, gradually the flutter in and about him stilled itself; the little leaves hung, the deer stopped; the pale summer clouds stayed; his limbs grew heavy on the ground; and he lay so still that by degrees the deer stepped nearer and the rooks wheeled round him and the swallows dipped and circled and the dragonflies shot past, as if all the fertility and amorous activity of a summer’s evening were woven web-like about his body.

This vivid ten-second image would come to him without warning and without consideration of either time or place. He could be riding on the subway or writing formulas on the blackboard or having a meal or (as now) sitting and talking to someone across a table, and it would envelop him like a soundless tsunami. By the time he noticed, it would be directly in front of him, and his arms and legs would be paralyzed. The flow of time stopped. The air grew thin, and he had trouble breathing. He lost all connection with the people and things around him. The tsunami’s liquid wall swallowed him whole. And though it felt to him as if the world were being closed off in darkness, he experienced no loss of awareness. It was just a sense of having been switched to a new track. Parts of his mind were, if anything, sharpened by the change. He felt no terror, but he could not keep his eyes open. His eyelids were clamped shut. Sounds grew distant, and the familiar image was projected onto the screen of his consciousness again and again. Sweat gushed from every part of his body and the armpits of his undershirt grew damp. He trembled all over, and his heartbeat grew faster and louder.

A companionable silence fell between them, and Kris found he liked this pleasant restful moment between them. But his curiosity won in the end. “So, Rafe… what do you look like?” “Specific measurements?” Rafe chuckled, and Kris’s blush deepened. “I’m six-four—” “Jesus, you’re a giant!” Kris exclaimed, comparing his mental image of Rafe with his own height of five-ten, and realizing his head would barely reach the guy’s shoulders. “Thanks… I think,” Rafe replied with adorable modesty. “I weigh about two fifteen—” “You’re in great shape, then,” Kris interjected dreamily as he imagined this stranger in front of him—and the picture was beginning to form and take a definite shape of masculine perfection, bulk of muscles and broad shoulders, wide chest and tall figure tapered down to the waist and hips. It was a very nice picture too—sex on a stick. “I ride a lot,” Rafe explained, then apparently thought better of it. “I mean I ride horses—not men.” Kris burst out laughing. “Good one. You… uh, never ride men…?” As if he was standing right in front of him, Kris could see Rafe grinning. “Maybe.” There was a pause, and Kris couldn’t wait to hear more as he wanted to see what his mate looked like through his mind’s eye.

Perhaps the most amazing practitioner of echolocation among humans is Daniel Kish, blind since he was one year old, who early in life discovered that making clicking noises helped him get around. Much of his brain must be reassigned to sound, because he uses his own clicks to navigate. He can ride a bicycle in traffic (hard to imagine), and he has founded World Access for the Blind to teach other blind people to use their own sonar—to summon, as it were, their inner dolphin. Sounds from his tongue clicks, he explains, “bounce off surfaces all around and return to my ears as faint echoes. My brain processes the echoes into dynamic images.… I construct a three-dimensional image of my surroundings for hundreds of feet in every direction. Up close, I can detect a pole an inch thick. At 15 feet, I recognize cars and bushes. Houses come into focus at 150 feet.” This is all so hard to imagine, people have wondered if he is telling the truth. But he’s not alone, and his claims appear to check out. He says, “Many students are surprised how quickly results come. I believe echolocation capacity is latent within us.… The neural hardware seems to be there; I’ve developed ways to activate it. Vision isn’t in the eyes; it’s in the mind.” So, is it possible that a dolphin such as a killer whale might actually see the echoes?

The stars aligned for Justin Trudeau in the last few weeks of the campaign. "Ultimately, voters opted for a change of government. If the Liberals hadn't done all their work. the NDP would have won the election. Anyway, the strongest desire felt by voters was to get rid of the Conservatives," says pollster Jean-Marc Leger. In Quebec, Trudeau exceeded all expectations by winning 40 of the province's 78 seats. Vote-splitting by the NDP and the Bloc handed victory to the Liberals in several Quebec ridings. The last time the Liberals had made that many gains was in 1980 when Pierre Elliot Trudeau won 74 of the province's 75 seats. The Liberals swept the four Atlantic provinces, a historical first. The party won all 32 seats there, in strongholds where the Conservatives were well established. The Liberal game plan - whatever its shortcomings - had what it took to get the Liberal Party of Canada from third place to victory in a single election. This was another historical first. "To turn a situation like that around the way Trudeau did is exceptional," says Jean-Marc Leger. "There was a desire for him to succeed, and he did succeed." For Justin Trudeau, the Trudeau name had long been both an asset and a liability. The son had inherited his father's old party but now he had rebuilt it in his own image. He had run his campaign his way. This was his victory, and his alone.

Throw the offerings!" Agnes and her husband had returned--- I could just make them out, clambering unsteadily down the hillside with their lanterns raised. In an act of ill-advised and entirely undeserved kindness, they had gathered up a handful of villagers to ride to the rescue of the idiot scholars who had tangled with the most fearsome of the local Folk, despite their warnings. A strangled sound escaped me, something between a sob and laugh. "Get back!" Eichorn shouted at the villagers. Rose was clambering to his feet, wheezing, for the fauns had released him to snatch at the "offerings" tossed their way by the villagers. I would have expected bloody hunks of meat, but instead, ludicrously, they seemed to be throwing vegetables--- carrots and onions, predominantly. How did it happen? The scene is a blur of noise and movement, to my memory. I believe I was laughing at the time--- yes, laughing. The image of those nightmarish beasts appeased by a hail of carrots was too much for my frayed composure, and for a moment it seemed this would become another story I told at conferences or to rouse a laugh from my students. For the Folk are terrible indeed, monsters or tyrants or both, but are they not also ridiculous? Whether they be violent beasts distracted by vegetables, or creatures powerful enough to spin straw into gold, which they will happily exchange for a simple necklace, or a great king overthrown by his own cloak, there is a thread of the absurd weaving through all faerie stories, to which the Folk themselves are utterly oblivious.

[Nero] castrated the boy Sporus and actually tried to make a woman of him; and he married him with all the usual ceremonies, including a dowry and a bridal veil, took him to his house attended by a great throng, and treated him as his wife. This Sporus, decked out with the finery of the empresses and riding in a litter, he took with him to the assizes and marts of Greece, and later at Rome through the Street of the Images,​ fondly kissing him from time to time. That he even desired illicit relations with his own mother, and was kept from it by her enemies, who feared that such a help might give the reckless and insolent woman too great influence, was notorious, especially after he added to his concubines a courtesan who was said to look very like Agrippina. Even before that, so they say, whenever he rode in a litter with his mother, he had incestuous relations with her, which were betrayed by the stains on his clothing. He so prostituted his own chastity that after defiling almost every part of his body, he at last devised a kind of game, in which, covered with the skin of some wild animal, he was let loose from a cage and attacked the private parts of men and women, who were bound to stakes, and when he had sated his mad lust, was dispatched​ by his freedman Doryphorus; for he was even married to this man in the same way that he himself had married Sporus, going so far as to imitate the cries and lamentations of a maiden being deflowered. He made a palace extending all the way from the Palatine to the Esquiline, which at first he called the House of Passage, but when it was burned shortly after its completion and rebuilt, the Golden House. Its size and splendour will be sufficiently indicated by the following details. Its vestibule was large enough to contain a colossal statue of the emperor a hundred and twenty feet high; and it was so extensive that it had a triple colonnade​ a mile long. There was a pond too, like a sea, surrounded with buildings to represent cities,​ besides tracts of country, varied by tilled fields, vineyards, pastures and woods, with great numbers of wild and domestic animals. In the rest of the house all parts were overlaid with gold and adorned with gems and mother-of‑pearl. There were dining-rooms with fretted ceils of ivory, whose panels could turn and shower down flowers and were fitted with pipes for sprinkling the guests with perfumes. The main banquet hall was circular and constantly revolved day and night, like the heavens. His mother offended him by too strict surveillance and criticism of his words and acts. At last terrified by her violence and threats, he determined to have her life, and after thrice attempting it by poison and finding that she had made herself immune by antidotes, he tampered with the ceiling of her bedroom, contriving a mechanical device for loosening its panels and dropping them upon her while she slept. When this leaked out through some of those connected with the plot, he devised a collapsible boat,​ to destroy her by shipwreck or by the falling in of its cabin. ...[He] offered her his contrivance, escorting her to it in high spirits and even kissing her breasts as they parted. The rest of the night he passed sleepless in intense anxiety, awaiting the outcome of his design. On learning that everything had gone wrong and that she had escaped by swimming, driven to desperation he secretly had a dagger thrown down beside her freedman Lucius Agermus, when he joyfully brought word that she was safe and sound, and then ordered that the freedman be seized and bound, on the charge of being hired to kill the emperor; that his mother be put to death, and the pretence made that she had escaped the consequences of her detected guilt by suicide.

In 2008, employees at an office for the accounting firm Deloitte were troubled by the behavior of a new recruit. In the midst of a bustling work environment, she didn’t seem to be doing anything except sitting at an empty desk and staring into space. Whenever someone would ask what she was doing, she would reply that she was “doing thought work” or “working on [her] thesis.” Then there was the day that she spent riding the elevators up and down repeatedly. When a coworker saw this and asked if she was “thinking again,” she replied: “It helps to see things from a different perspective.”2 The employees became uneasy. Urgent inter-office emails were sent. It turned out that the staff had unwittingly taken part in a performance piece called The Trainee. The silent employee was Pilvi Takala, a Finnish artist who is known for videos in which she quietly threatens social norms with simple actions. In a piece called Bag Lady, for instance, she spent days roaming a mall in Berlin while carrying a clear plastic bag full of euro bills. Christy Lange describes the piece in Frieze: “While this obvious display of wealth should have made her the ‘perfect customer,’ she only aroused suspicion from security guards and disdain from shopkeepers. Others urged her to accept a more discreet bag for her money.”3 The Trainee epitomized Takala’s method. As observed by a writer at Pumphouse Gallery, which showed her work in 2017, there is nothing inherently unusual about the notion of not working while at work; people commonly look at Facebook on their phones or seek other distractions during work hours. It was the image of utter inactivity that so galled Takala’s colleagues. “Appearing as if you’re doing nothing is seen as a threat to the general working order of the company, creating a sense of the unknown,” they wrote, adding solemnly, “The potential of nothing is everything.

Then, on a left-hand curve 2.8 kilometres from the finish line, Marco delivers another cutting acceleration. Tonkov is immediately out of the saddle. The gap reaches two lengths. Tonkov fights his way back and is on Marco’s wheel when Marco, who is still standing on the pedals, accelerates again. Suddenly Tonkov is no longer there. Afterwards Tonkov would say he could no longer feel his hands and feet. ‘I had to stop. I lost his slipstream. I couldn’t go on.’ Marco told Romano Cenni he could taste blood. His performance on Montecampione was close to self-mutilation. Seven hundred metres from the finish line, the TV camera on the inside of the final right-hand bend, looking down the hill, picks Marco up over two hundred metres from the line and follows him for fifty metres, a fifteen-second close-up, grainy, pallid in the late-afternoon light. A car and motorbike, diffused and ghostlike, pass between the camera and Marco, emerging out of the gloom. The image cuts to another camera, tight on him as he swings round into the finishing straight, a five-second flash before the live, wide shot of the stage finish: Marco, framed between ecstatic fans on either side, and the finish-line scaffolding adorned with race sponsors‘ logos; largest, and centrally, the Gazzetta dello Sport, surrounded by branding for iced tea, shower gel, telephone services. Then we see it again in the super-slow-motion replay; the five seconds between the moment Marco appeared in the closing straight and the moment he crossed the finish line are extruded to fifteen strung-out seconds. The image frames his head and little else, revealing details invisible in real time and at standard resolution: a drop of sweat that falls from his chin as he makes the bend, the gaping jaw and crumpled forehead and lines beneath the eyes that deepen as Marco wrings still more speed from the mountain. As he rides towards victory in the Giro d‘Italia, Marco pushes himself so deeply into the pain of physical exertion that the gaucheness he has always shown before the camera dissolves, and — this must be the instant he crosses the line — he begins to rise out of his agony. The torso lifts to vertical, the arms spread out into a crucifix position, the eyelids descend, and Marco‘s face, altered by the darkness he has seen in his apnoea, lifts towards the light.

What about you? I know you’re not married. Are you seeing anyone or anything?” An image of Brooke sleeping in his bed popped into Cade’s head. Then a second image came to mind, of her giving him the “text me” speech at his front door. “Nothing serious.” “Really? ’Cuz you paused there.” If one more person commented on these damn alleged pauses . . . “Just eat your lunch,” Cade said. With a grin, Zach threw Cade’s words back at him. “If you’re having trouble talking to some girl, maybe you need to find another way to tell her how you feel.” “I know how to talk to her just fine.” “Maybe you’re not saying the right things, then.” “Can we change the subject?” Cade ran his hand through his hair. “You’re sixteen years old. Trust me, relationships get a lot more complicated when you’re an adult.” “Is this a friends-with-benefits situation?” “Aren’t you a little young to know about friends-with-benefits situations?” “I didn’t say I was partaking in them myself,” Zach said. “But shockingly, yes, I have heard of scenarios in which adults engage in intercourse without riding off into the sunset together.” Cade tried to decide how best to sum up the situation with Brooke. “There is a woman. We are friendly. There have been benefits.” “Do you like her?” Cade gestured with his burger. “Of course I like her. She’s, like, the smartest, wittiest, woman I’ve ever met. And hot, too.” “Yeah, I can see why you’d be confused about that,” Zach said. “Smart, witty, and hot. Sounds like a real complicated situation to me.” Okay, fine. To youthful, unjaded ears, it probably did sound odd. Cade tried a different way to explain. “She and I are on the same page. We’re just keeping it casual.” “Hey, you’re an intelligent guy, you obviously know what you’re doing,” Zach said. “But casual or not, if this girl’s that great you probably need to follow your own advice.” “What advice is that?” “Up your game.” That said, Zach took a big bite of his cheeseburger. Cade thought about that. Up his game? Pfft. If he had been thinking he might want to try to change Brooke’s mind about their just-having-fun situation—which obviously he did not, since no man of sound mind and body ever messed with a just-having-fun situation—maybe then he’d worry about upping his game. He scoffed. “You’re a teenager. What do you know?” “I’m wise beyond my years,” Zach said, his mouth full of burger

She stayed with buses after that, getting off only now and then to walk so she'd keep awake. What fragments of dreams came had to do with the post horn. Later, possibly, she would have trouble sorting the night into real and dreamed. At some indefinite passage in night's sonorous score, it also came to her that she would be safe, that something, perhaps only her linearly fading drunkenness, would protect her. The city was hers, as, made up and sleeked so with the customary words and images (cosmopolitan, culture, cable cars) it had not been before: she had safe-passage tonight to its far blood's branchings, be they capillaries too small for more than peering into, or vessels mashed together in shameless municipal hickeys, out on the skin for all but tourists to see. Nothing of the night's could touch her; nothing did. The repetition of symbols was to be enough, without trauma as well perhaps to attenuate it or even jar it altogether loose from her memory. She was meant to remember. She faced that possibility as she might the toy street from a high balcony, roller-coaster ride, feeding-time among the beasts in a zoo-any death-wish that can be consummated by some minimum gesture. She touched the edge of its voluptuous field, knowing it would be lovely beyond dreams simply to submit to it; that not gravity's pull, laws of ballistics, feral ravening, promised more delight. She tested it, shivering: I am meant to remember. Each clue that comes is supposed to have its own clarity, its fine chances for permanence. But then she wondered if the gemlike "clues" were only some kind of compensation. To make up for her having lost the direct, epileptic Word, the cry that might abolish the night. In Golden Gate Park she came on a circle of children in their nightclothes, who told her they were dreaming the gathering. But that the dream was really no different from being awake, because in the mornings when they got up they felt tired, as if they'd been up most of the night. When their mothers thought they were out playing they were really curled in cupboards of neighbors' houses, in platforms up in trees, in secretly-hollowed nests inside hedges, sleeping, making up for these hours. The night was empty of all terror for them, they had inside their circle an imaginary fire, and needed nothing but their own unpenetrated sense of community. They knew about the post horn, but nothing of the chalked game Oedipa had seen on the sidewalk. You used only one image and it was a jump-rope game, a little girl explained: you stepped alternately in the loop, the bell, and the mute, while your girlfriend sang: Tristoe, Tristoe, one, two, three, Turning taxi from across the sea… "Thurn and Taxis, you mean?" They'd never heard it that way. Went on warming their hands at an invisible fire. Oedipa, to retaliate, stopped believing in them.

From behind me, Jaz let out an outraged cry, "Ash! I can take care of myself. I'm saur!" I ignored him, and so did Hatches. She pranced closer, and pictures started to form in my mind, giving me a view of the world from the perspective of the smallest of the saurs. Trying to join in games with the others, and always being pushed away. Having her meat killed for eve, even though the other younglings were hunting for themselves. Swimming in the shallows of the seven pools while the others leaped from the rocks into the deeps. Then came images of the new saur who was even smaller than she was. Jaz flinging himself into a saur game, being immediately tossed out, and diving right back in again. Jaz trying to eat raw meat, throwing up, and starting a cooking fire that set the grasses alight and had to be stomped out with tough saur feet. Jaz chattering endlessly - would Hatches help him shape very small rocks so he could glue them to his fingers to make claws? Could Hatches listen to him practise his hissing to see if he had it right? Did Hatches think, if he was extra good, that Tramples-my-Enemies might let him ride on his back?

In destroying its own agency, as well as in many other ways, the backlash is a precise mirror image of the pseudo-leftist academic discipline known as cultural studies. According to this theoretical tendency, the most banal and routine culture-products are intensely political and subversive; the left is constantly but silently winning the war over everyday life; and even the lowliest of consumers are endowed with massive quantities of agency, with a stupendous power to exert their radical will in the world. For the backlash, on the other hand, nobody has agency except for people on the left. We, the Middle Americans, are utterly powerless to change our culture -- to ban abortion or outlaw sodomy or build Ten Commandments monuments -- or to prevent the left from wrecking daily life. And yes, the backlash agrees, everything is politicized -- the way you mow your lawn, the color you paint your house, whether or not you ride a bicycle -- but politicized negatively. Everything offends; everything is calculated to advance liberalism's plot to make the culture more to its liking. Backlashers are, in fact, just about the only people in the world who would agree with the professors who find all sorts of subversiveness in Madonna and Britney and Christina Aguilera. A final, telling commonality: neither movement bothers seriously to consider the role of business in American life of culture.

An image pops into my head of Gabriel Storm in my bed, his golden skin sheened with sweat while I ride him to paradise. Oh. My. God. Where did that come from? I’ve sworn to stay away from men.

Rorschach’s body could activate his vision: “When, for example, I am unable to call up Schwind’s painting Falkenstein’s Ride as a memory image but I know how the knight is holding his right arm (‘knowing’ here as a nonperceptual mental image), I can voluntarily copy the position of this arm, in my imagination or in reality, and this immediately gives me a visual memory of the picture that is much better than without this aid.” This was, he reiterated, precisely the same as what happened in his schizophrenic patients: by holding his arm the right way, he had “hallucinatorily called forth, so to speak, the perceptual components of the visual image.

ORIGIN OF HOLLYWOOD On ride the masked men, wrapped in white sheets, bearing white crosses, torches held high: mounted avengers of the virtue of ladies and the honor of gentlemen strike fear into Negroes hungering for damsels’ white flesh. At the height of a wave of lynchings, D. W. Griffith’s film The Birth of a Nation sings a hymn of praise to the Ku Klux Klan. This is Hollywood’s first blockbuster and the greatest box office success ever for a silent movie. It is also the first film to ever open at the White House. President Woodrow Wilson gives it a standing ovation. Applauding it, he applauds himself: freedom’s famous flag-bearer wrote most of the texts that accompany the epic images. The president’s words explain that the emancipation of the slaves was “a veritable overthrow of Civilization in the South, the white South under the heel of the black South.” Ever since, chaos reigns because blacks are “men who knew none of the uses of authority, except its insolences.” But the president lights the lamp of hope: “At last there had sprung into existence a great Ku Klux Klan.” And even Jesus himself comes down from heaven at the end of the movie to give his blessing.

He even traipsed to a temple with Ram Ram Basu to debate two Brahmins in front of about 200 natives. His mission never seemed more right as he heard Brahmins explain the wooden image of a man riding the back of a tiger was Dukkinroy, the god of the woods, and the wooden image of a headless woman riding a headless horse was Sheetulla, the goddess of smallpox. “This is idolatry,” he told them in stumbling words with the help of Ram Ram Basu. “It is wicked.” And he went on to try to explain how the only way to salvation was through Christ.

When you encounter people who are poisoned inside, don’t let it rub off on you. If you sink down to their level and you’re cold and rude back to them, you’ve allowed them to contaminate you. Rise above that. Be a part of the solution, not the problem. You overcome evil with good. If somebody is rude to you, just bless them, smile, and keep moving forward. Jesus put it this way: “Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth” (Matthew 5:5 NIV). When we hear the word meek, many times we think of someone who is weak, shy, and reserved; just a fearful little person. The image is that meek people can’t stand up for themselves and everyone runs over them. That’s not meek at all. Meekness is not weakness. It’s strength under control. Meekness is like a wild stallion that has been tamed. The horse is still strong, still powerful, and has just as much speed as before he was tamed. The only difference is, now that strength is under control. You can walk up to the horse, pet him, lead him around, probably get on him and ride him. But don’t be fooled. He has the same power, the same tenacity; he’s just learned how to control it. When you’re a meek person, you don’t go around trying to straighten everybody out. You don’t respond to every critic. People may be talking about you, but you don’t let it bother you. Keep your strength under control. It’s not how proud you are, or how many people you straighten out, or how you can prove yourself. If you argue with a critic and try to prove yourself, all you’re doing is sinking to his or her level. Don’t fall into that trap. You are an eagle. You can rise above it. You may have the power to straighten out your critic. You may feel like giving them a piece of your mind. Your emotions may tell you, Get in there. Pay them back. Get even. Instead, listen to what the apostle Paul told his protégé Timothy: “Be calm and cool and steady” (2 Timothy 4:5 AMP). He was saying, in other words, “Don’t give away your power. Keep your strength under control.

As he turned her face to study her, he said, “You have more courage than you have strength, Yellow Hair. It is not wise to fight when you cannot win.” Looking up at his carved features and the arrogant set of his mouth, she longed for the strength to jerk him off his horse. He wasn’t just taunting her, he was challenging her, mocking her. “You will yield. Look at me and know the face of your master. Remember it well.” Riding high on humiliation, Loretta forgot Amy, Aunt Rachel, everything. An image of her mother’s face flashed before her. Never, as long as she had life in her body, would she yield to him. She worked her parched mouth and spat. Nothing came out, but the message rang clear. “Nei mah-heepicut!” Releasing her, he struck her lightly on the arm. Wheeling his horse, he glanced toward the windows of the house and thumped his chest with a broad fist. “I claim her!” Loretta staggered, watching in numb disbelief as Hunter pranced his stallion in a circle around her. I claim her? Warily she turned, keeping him in sight, unsure of what he might do. He rode erect, his eyes touching on her dress, her face, her hair, as if everything about her were a curiosity. A taunting smile curved his mouth. His attention centered on her full skirt, and she could almost see the questions churning in his head. He repositioned his hand on the lance. The determination in his expression filled her with foreboding. He rode directly toward her, and she sidestepped. He turned his mount to come at her again. As he swept by he leaned forward, catching the hem of her skirt with his lance. Loretta whirled, striking out with her forearms, but the Indian moved expertly, his aim swift and sure, his horse precision-trained to the pressure of his legs. He was as bent on seeing her undergarments as she was on keeping them hidden. The outcome of their battle was a foregone conclusion, and Loretta knew it. His friends encouraged him, whooping with ribald laughter each time her ruffles flashed. She snatched the dirty peace flag from the wooden shaft and threw it to the earth, grinding it beneath the heel of her shoe. After fending off several more passes, exhaustion claimed its victory, and Loretta realized the folly in fighting. She stood motionless, breasts heaving, her eyes staring fixedly at nothing, head lifted. The warrior circled her, guiding his stallion’s flashing hooves so close to her feet that her toes tingled. When she didn’t move, he reined the horse to a halt and studied her for several seconds before he leaned forward to finger the bodice of her dress. Her breath snagged when he slid a palm over her bosom to the indentation of her waist. “Ai-ee,” he whispered. “You learn quick.” Raising tear-filled eyes to his, she again spat in his face. This time he felt the spray and wiped his cheek, his lips quivering with something that looked suspiciously like suppressed laughter, friendly laughter this time. “Maybe not so quick. But I am a good teacher. You will learn not to fight me, Yellow Hair. It is a promise I make for you.

Sensing reprieve, grasping for it with eager disbelief, she lifted her lashes in confusion to see the same emotion reflected in his cobalt eyes. He began to tremble, as if the lance weighed a thousand pounds. And suddenly she knew that as much as he longed to murder her, a part of him couldn’t, wouldn’t throw the lance. It made no sense. She could see nothing but hatred written on his chiseled face. He had surely killed hundreds of times and would kill again. Slowly he lowered his arm and stared at her as if she had bested him in some way. Then, so quickly she couldn’t be sure she saw it, pain flashed across his face. “So you’re sweet?” His smile dripped ice. “We shall see, woman, we shall see.” He said “woman” as if he were spitting bile and slid his lance arrow to her chin. She had heard of women being disfigured by Indians and expected him to slash her as he outlined her mouth and the slope of her nose. Breathless fear brought moisture to her brow. Black spots danced, blurring her vision. She blinked and forced herself to focus on him. Laughter twinkled in his eyes. She realized that since he had decided not to kill her, he was, for some reason she couldn’t imagine, playing a hideous game, terrifying her to test her mettle. She caught hold of his lance and shoved it aside, lifting her head in defiance. Chuckling low in his chest, he leaned over his thigh, making a fist in her hair. His grip brought tears to her eyes. As he turned her face to study her, he said, “You have more courage than you have strength, Yellow Hair. It is not wise to fight when you cannot win.” Looking up at his carved features and the arrogant set of his mouth, she longed for the strength to jerk him off his horse. He wasn’t just taunting her, he was challenging her, mocking her. “You will yield. Look at me and know the face of your master. Remember it well.” Riding high on humiliation, Loretta forgot Amy, Aunt Rachel, everything. An image of her mother’s face flashed before her. Never, as long as she had life in her body, would she yield to him. She worked her parched mouth and spat. Nothing came out, but the message rang clear. “Nei mah-heepicut!” Releasing her, he struck her lightly on the arm. Wheeling his horse, he glanced toward the windows of the house and thumped his chest with a broad fist. “I claim her!

I mean that robust men such as yourself usually prefer other, more physical pursuits." The color of his irises intensified. "Physical, hmm? And just what sort of 'physical pursuits' did you have in mind?" Her cheeks grew warm, subtly aware that she had stumbled into dangerous territory. For some unfathomable reason, images of secluded, romantic rendezvouses and stolen kisses leapt into her head- subjects about which she was sure Jack Byron was an expert. "Hunting and angling and riding, for instance," she said in a hushed tumble of words. "Well, I must admit I enjoy a round of hunting and angling every now and again. As for riding..." His gaze lowered to her lips. "I'm always up for a good ride." Her throat became too tight to swallow. 'Why,' she wondered, 'do I have the impression that he isn't talking about horses?

The spittin’ image of--What was your dead friend’s name?” “It is not to be spoken. He is dead, no? To say his name would not show respect. What is this to do with spit?” “It’s just a saying. When someone or something looks just like something else, it’s called a spittin’ image. I don’t know why.” “You do not know, but you say the words? The words from your mouth say who you are, Blue Eyes. I make a lie; I am an easop, storyteller. I speak hate; my heart burns with hate. The People do not make talk if they do not know the words. If it is spoken, it must be. A man is what he speaks. This is not so with the tosi tivo?” Loretta shrugged and bit back a smile. “I seriously doubt I’ll become spit. It’s just something everyone says.” “You will learn the meaning of this spit image, no? And say it to me. When we meet again?” Loretta tightened her hand on the reins. “Yes, if we meet again.” He glanced over at her, his expression suddenly solemn. “We walk backward in our footsteps, eh? Maybe you will walk forward a new way when we reach your wooden walls. You could be a little bit happy as my woman, no?” Loretta fixed her eyes on the horizon ahead of them. They were only a day and a half’s ride from her home. A day and a half from real clothes, a chance to wash her hair, to eat her own kind of food. Yes, he had been kind to her. As reluctant as she was to admit it, she’d even come to like him a little. But not enough to belong to him. Never that. “To be happy, I must be at my wooden walls,” she said shakily. “That’s my home and where my people are.” There was only tonight and tomorrow night to get through, and then she’d be home. Suvate. It was almost finished.

To ride the chaos, remake the world in their own image. It takes a special kind of hubris to throw the world into the fires and believe you can pull it back out without being consumed yourself.” “So that’s what this is all about?” Roth asked, the irony clear in his voice. “A ‘better’ world?” “Isn’t it always?” Harry allowed himself a grim smile. A nameless wag had once observed that the reason history repeated itself was that no one had been listening the first time around. Not that they ever did. “They believe they can accomplish with this what none of the wars they bled and died in ever have—eliminate the Islamist threat to the UK, once and for all. A ‘final solution’, you might call it.

You are divided," said the High King, simply. "Your father did his best to shape you after his own image. He created a predator. A wolf, if you will. And ever since then, the create that he formed has been masquerading as a princess and attempting to devour the rest of you. the real you.

Then suddenly Merry felt it at last, beyond doubt: a change. Wind was in his face! Light was glimmering. Far, far away, in the South the clouds could be dimly seen as remote grey shapes, rolling up, drifting: morning lay beyond them. But at that moment there was a flash, as if lightning had sprung from the earth beneath the city. For a searing second it stood dazzling far off in black and white, its topmost tower like a glittering needle; and then as the darkness closed again there came rolling over the fields a great boom. At that sound the bent shape of the king sprang suddenly erect. Tall and proud he seemed again; and rising in his stirrups he cried in a loud voice, more clear than any there had ever heard a mortal man achieve before: "Arise, arise, Riders of Théoden! Fell deeds awake: fire and slaughter! spear shall be shaken, shield be splintered, a sword-day, a red day, ere the sun rises! Ride now, ride now! Ride to Gondor!" With that he siezed a great horn from Guthláf his banner-bearer and he blew such a blast upon it that it burst asunder. And straightaway all the horns in the host were lifted up in music, and the blowing of the horns of Rohan in that hour was like a storm on the plain and a thunder in the mountains. "Ride now, ride now! Ride to Gondor!" Suddenly the King cried to Snowmane and the horse sprang away. Behind him his banner blew in the wind, white horse upon a field of green, but he outpaced it. After him thundered the knights of his house, but he was ever before them. Éomer rode there, the white horsetail on his helm floating in his speed, and the front of the first éored roared like a breaker foaming to the shore, but Théoden could not be overtaken. Fey he seemed, or the battle-fury of his fathers ran like new fire in his veins, and he was borne up on Snowmane like a god of old, even as Oromë the Great in the battle of the Valar when the world was young. His golden shield was uncovered, and lo! it shone like an image of the Sun, and the grass flamed into green about the white feet of his steed. For morning came, morning and a wind from the sea; and darkness was removes, and the hosts of Mordor wailed, and terror overtook them, and they fled, and died, and the hoofs of wrath overtook them. And then all the host of Rohan burst into song, and they sang as they slew, for the joy of battle was on them, and the sound of their singing that was fair and terrible came even to the city.

Another night, under the moonlight, she speaks to me. The language appears to me- as a dream in a dream. Asked to carry forth with a vision, a great path is presented. The waters to get there are not easy. I navigate, I asked and I doubt. 'Oh, but I must doubt the doubt, just as our great Maharishi had said.' She says, 'you are in the water, flow- swim through it and soon, yes very soon, you shall be freedom horse and you will meet the great wise tree.' I continue feeling strong, growing in courage, I navigate the waters. I turn around to see- Oh, my journey Soul and friend is there- A little behind; yet, navigating as I am. Can I do it? Images of things and people- once known, situations once scorned. I float past deeper into the vast. I reach the edge of a great cliff- great glowing waters appear- I jump. No thoughts are there. I fall into the depths of the waters. What if I don't resurface? Will I have air to breathe? I appear above it all. To my right is the grandest of trees. So strong, yet so soft and tender- I rest. Looking back to everything else- to the Soul waiting above at the water's edge I cry out, 'jump'. Silence. The journey must continue. The path is clear. The doubts have faded. The Soul is healed. My guides and ancestors ride with me as I am now freedom horse. The call is answered. The tribe awaits. We dance upon the water.

When I took the title of Elvis Presley’s last single for Sun Records as the title for this book, I had no argument to make for it. The words had an echo in them, that was all I knew. More than thirty years later, I know one thing more: it’s been a good train to hitch a ride on. Over time, the idea or the image of the song has surfaced again and again, as a kind of talisman—of, I think, the need or the wish for mystery itself, as a dimension of life too often missing.

Wait…” I stop myself, sidetracked by the image of him on his knees in front of her. “Did you have her spit your shit back into your mouth? Is that what you were doing when I walked up?” Karson smirks. “Don’t act like you’ve never done that.” “I can say with utmost certainty I have not.” “You kiss women after they suck your dick, no?” I scoff. “It’s not the same.

The notion of Baal riding on a winged war chariot is implicit in mdl, one element in Baal’s meteorological entourage in KTU 1.5 V 6-11.342 Psalm 77:19 refers to the wheels in Yahweh’s storm theophany, which presumes a divine war chariot. Psalm 18 (2 Sam. 22):11 presents Yahweh riding on the wind surrounded by storm clouds. This image forms the basis for the description of the divine chariot in Ezekiel 1 and 10.

Mencheres leaned forward, catching the laughing young man’s attention. His eyes flashed green before he spoke. “Lean back with her into the corner. Say nothing. You feel no fear.” That familiar complacent look settled over the young man’s face as he draped an arm around Kira and leaned them into the side of the carriage. She almost gasped. With half his body pressed to hers, his pulse seemed to drown out all the other noises around them, focusing her attention on that delicious, steady rhythm. “The hand is safest until you have more experience. Then advance to the wrist, then the neck—but never bite the jugular unless you mean to kill,” Mencheres instructed in a calm voice. The ride entered a faux ballroom filled with images of dozens of dancing ghosts dressed in eighteenth-century attire. Kira looked at them instead of the young man’s face as she slowly drew his hand to her mouth, reminding herself to exert no more pressure than she had when handling those eggs. If anyone could see them, all they’d notice was a couple huddled in the corner of the Doom Buggy, the man’s hand over a woman’s mouth as if urging her to silence. Her glasses hid her glowing eyes, and the young man’s hand blocked her fangs from anyone’s view when they popped out as that throbbing pulse beneath his thumb neared her mouth. She closed her eyes, chanting “gently, gently” to herself as she pressed her fangs into the vein jumping against her lips.

If we assess the results of this swift foray into the ancient Celtic literature, we can conclude the following: dwarfs are handsome or ugly, hostile or helpful, sometimes thieves or kidnappers. They inhabit kingdoms that are located on islands, in lakes, or in the sea, or are even underground. They live in communities there that are headed by a king. They celebrate festivals, play music, ride small horses, possess magical objects, and have supernatural powers. It appears they are excellent craftsmen. It is important that we underscore the fact that this image of the dwarf owes much to the romances, and the ancient features it contains no longer hold any value. It is obvious that there are several races of dwarfs—as the terms corr and afanc attest—who are deeply entangled with the otherworld, which does not seem to be restricted only to the land of Faery, and on this point the Celtic dwarfs and the dwarfs of the romances are opposites. But through the channel of the Matter of Britain, a veritable bridge set down between the Celtic world and the Romance world, certain peculiarities of these dwarfs from green Ireland and Wales have crossed over into France and combined with other motifs—motifs which, in this case, stem from the Germanic world.

Until then, my image of pop stars were just "pop stars." The people I grew up listening to and admiring. It's only right to be fascinated. I had this fantasy that they would be very different from me. But then, I learned they really weren't. On the outside, they ride expensive cars, wear gold chains, and have fancy parties every day. But a lot of it turned out to be just part of the business. It was "work" for them, in other words. And if they couldn't afford the cars or jewelry, they would rent them to show them off. There was, shall we say, a shattering. My fantasies were just shattered.

Madlon’s voice broke into his musings. “It’s kind of funny, but I just happened to notice that all the trail horses are males—” Her husband’s laughter cut off the rest of the question, but Ward had gotten the gist of it. “Shame on you, Pug, for checking out other guys’ equipment!” Madlon blushed at her husband’s teasing. “I noticed, that’s all. It stuck out.” Her husband whooped again. Ward fought a grin. “You’re right, our trail horses are geldings. We’ve found the rides go better with single sex horses, especially as we often have novice riders. Mares are great. They’re actually harder workers—” “Of course they are. That applies to females of all species,” Madlon said. “True. But when a mare goes into heat she sometimes gets a little tetchy and even gelded horses get distracted—” And just like that, an image of Tess and her huge dark eyes, saucy ponytail, and exquisite curves popped into his mind. He had no doubt she would do her best to clock—or geld—him if he were foolish enough to ask if she was in heat.

When the nature of Satan is sown and grown into man, the result is madness; which is what we see around us in the world today. The Bible shows explicitly that the degeneration of man can be brought to fruition if the mind is made to meditate upon the things of this world. Through the use of images in the media such as television, movies, music, video games, etc., the Devil is able to take the mind on a roller coaster ride into the spirit world. Over time, this will corrupt the very fabric of human thought. When this demonic onslaught is completed, the mind is left perverted and the soul is destroyed until finally it ends in the state of reprobation (Romans 1:20-32). The reprobate mind is one that is cast away and decadent; it longs for that which is perverse and totally destitute.

siblings and was raised by his mother and father, Stephen and Viola Engel Armstrong. From an early age, he showed tremendous interest in the night sky, and spent much time looking at the stars through a telescope owned by one of his neighbors. The Ford 'Tin Goose' - image by Ford Tri-Motor creative commons Neil was only six when he enjoyed his first airplane ride, leaving the ground in Warren, Ohio. His father accompanied him up into the sky in a Ford Trimotor, also known as the Tin Goose. You could say that history was in the making that day because it stimulated Neil’s fascination with aviation, space and the skies.

Bizarre and Surprising Insights—Consumer Behavior Insight Organization Suggested Explanation7 Guys literally drool over sports cars. Male college student subjects produce measurably more saliva when presented with images of sports cars or money. Northwestern University Kellogg School of Management Consumer impulses are physiological cousins of hunger. If you buy diapers, you are more likely to also buy beer. A pharmacy chain found this across 90 days of evening shopping across dozens of outlets (urban myth to some, but based on reported results). Osco Drug Daddy needs a beer. Dolls and candy bars. Sixty percent of customers who buy a Barbie doll buy one of three types of candy bars. Walmart Kids come along for errands. Pop-Tarts before a hurricane. Prehurricane, Strawberry Pop-Tart sales increased about sevenfold. Walmart In preparation before an act of nature, people stock up on comfort or nonperishable foods. Staplers reveal hires. The purchase of a stapler often accompanies the purchase of paper, waste baskets, scissors, paper clips, folders, and so on. A large retailer Stapler purchases are often a part of a complete office kit for a new employee. Higher crime, more Uber rides. In San Francisco, the areas with the most prostitution, alcohol, theft, and burglary are most positively correlated with Uber trips. Uber “We hypothesized that crime should be a proxy for nonresidential population.…Uber riders are not causing more crime. Right, guys?” Mac users book more expensive hotels. Orbitz users on an Apple Mac spend up to 30 percent more than Windows users when booking a hotel reservation. Orbitz applies this insight, altering displayed options according to your operating system. Orbitz Macs are often more expensive than Windows computers, so Mac users may on average have greater financial resources. Your inclination to buy varies by time of day. For retail websites, the peak is 8:00 PM; for dating, late at night; for finance, around 1:00 PM; for travel, just after 10:00 AM. This is not the amount of website traffic, but the propensity to buy of those who are already on the website. Survey of websites The impetus to complete certain kinds of transactions is higher during certain times of day. Your e-mail address reveals your level of commitment. Customers who register for a free account with an Earthlink.com e-mail address are almost five times more likely to convert to a paid, premium-level membership than those with a Hotmail.com e-mail address. An online dating website Disclosing permanent or primary e-mail accounts reveals a longer-term intention. Banner ads affect you more than you think. Although you may feel you've learned to ignore them, people who see a merchant's banner ad are 61 percent more likely to subsequently perform a related search, and this drives a 249 percent increase in clicks on the merchant's paid textual ads in the search results. Yahoo! Advertising exerts a subconscious effect. Companies win by not prompting customers to think. Contacting actively engaged customers can backfire—direct mailing financial service customers who have already opened several accounts decreases the chances they will open more accounts (more details in Chapter 7).

On the outside, I appeared happy and giddy, but on the inside, my soul had died. Everything that had ever mattered to me had been abandoned, but what was even more depressing was the fact that I didn’t even seem to care. I was content in my washed-up 40-something body, looking like a has-been. And then, when the ride was over, when I was no longer good for his image, I washed out with the tide, out to sea, silently screaming as I crashed against the rocky shores.

Julian Street in his book, Abroad At Home: American Ramblings, Observations, and Adventures, painted a grim picture of Western Kansas as he traveled across the area in 1914. Street saw only a drab, treeless wasteland of brown and gray---“nothing, nothing, nothing”--images of incessant wind, violent cyclones, dust storms, and tragic desolation. As the train he was riding approached the small town of Monotony, which he felt was appropriately named, he listened sympathetically to the remarks of a fellow passenger: “God! How can they stand living out here? I’d rather be dead!

Be thankful all she did was raise her voice," Mr. Blackpool told Sarah conspiratorially. "During the ride to London, I had to talk her out of scaling up the townhouse walls, should the door go unanswered." She had to hide her smile at the image of flamboyant Mrs. Blackpool climbing row houses like a circus monkey. "We are fortunate indeed that such measures did not prove necessary.

Leliana advanced like a predator, hair lashing like a whip behind her. She abandoned the reins, riding the horse like they had merged into one charging centaur. She aroused images of deities on winged horses, of untamed forests in a windstorm, of legendary heroes of legendary quests. Burning desire shot straight to his loins at the sight of her. He ached for this woman, this goddess that streaked across his vision like a figment of his imagination, of his deepest desires and most guarded wishes. He could lose himself, mind, body, and soul, to a woman like that. Any sane man would.

Here I stand, regretting our missed opportunity to walk. A year ago I would have happily run up in the hills, whether it rained or not. And I was thinking that I could go out, in spite of the weather, but I wouldn’t enjoy it like I used to.” She gestured in amicable agreement. “There’s no fault in misliking the feel of a water-soaked gown.” “That’s part of it,” I said, seizing on the image. “Last year I wore the same clothes year round. My only hat was a castoff that Julen found me somewhere. I loved the feel of rain against my face, and never minded being soaked. I never noticed it! Now I own carriage hats, and walking hats, and riding hats, and ball headdresses--and none of them except the riding hats can get wet, and even those get ruined in a good soak. My old hat never had any shape to begin with, or any color, so it was never ruined.” I turned to face the window again. “Sometimes I feel like I didn’t lose just my hat, I lost my self that horrible night when I walked into Bran’s trap.” Nee was silent. I ran my thumb around the gilt rim of the cup a couple of times, then I made myself face her. “You think I’m being foolish?” She put her palms together in Peaceful Discourse mode. “Yes I do,” she said, but her tone was not unkind. “One doesn’t lose a self, like a pair of gloves or a pin. We learn and change, or we harden into stone.” “Maybe I’ve changed too fast. Or haven’t changed enough,” I muttered. “Have you compromised yourself in any important way?” she asked. I opened my mouth to say Of course, when we were forced to give up our plans to defeat Galdran, but I knew it would be an untruth as soon as it left my lips. “I think,” I said slowly, “I lost my purpose that day. Life was so easy when all I lived for was the revolt, the accomplishment of which was to bring about all these wondrous miracles. Nothing turned out to be the way we so confidently expected it to. Nothing.” “So…” She paused to sip. “…if you hadn’t walked into that trap, what would be different?” “Besides the handsomeness of my foot?” I forced a grin as I kicked my slippered toes out from under my hem. No one could see my scarred foot, not with all the layers of fine clothing I now wore, but the scars were there. She smiled, but waited for me to answer her question. I said, “I suppose the outcome in the larger sense would have been the same. In the personal sense, though, I suspect I would have been spared a lot of humiliation.” “The humiliation of finding out that your political goals were skewed by misinformation?” “By ignorance. But that wasn’t nearly as humiliating as---” my encounters with a specific individual. But I just shook my head, and didn’t say it. “So you blame Vidanric,” she said neutrally. “Yes…no…I don’t know,” I said, trying not to sound cross. “I don’t.” I looked down, saw my hand fidgeting with the curtain and dropped it to my side.

Here.” He held out his hand. “I’ll carry you on my back, but we have to move. There might be a highway within reach. You could hitch a ride into Belize and get to the coast, maybe to an airport.” “Why am I the only one hitching a ride?” When he ran his fingers through his hair, she said, “What? Tell me.” “The moon is full this eve.” “Oh.” Of course she’d noticed, but she hadn’t thought the ramifications could be this dire until she’d seen his expression just now. Oh, hell. “I’ve been debating the best way to get you out of my reach. If I run from you, I leave you vulnerable. If I stay with you . . .” He trailed off. “You look like the apocalypse has arrived. Is it really so dangerous?” Instead of reassuring her, he nodded. “Aye. I lose control over myself, and the difference between us in strength is just too vast. If given free leave to take you, I’d rend you in two.” She swallowed. “What exactly do you turn into, MacRieve? Describe it to me.” He answered, “The Lykae call it saorachadh ainmhidh bho a cliabhan—letting the beast out of its cage. My face will change, becoming a cross between lupine and human. My body grows larger, taller. My strength increases exponentially.” “I’ve seen the fangs and claws.” “Sharper and longer. And flickering over me will be an image of the beast inside me. It is . . . harrowing to those not of my kind.” “What would you do to me?” He looked away. “I’d take you in the dirt like an animal. I’d mark your body with my fangs, and even after the bite healed, Lykae could still see it forever and know you’d been claimed.” He rubbed his hand over his mouth, as if imagining it even then. “What does your gut feeling tell you to do with me?” he asked, facing her again. “Take away everything else—what do you sense?” She thought for a moment, trying to digest what he’d just told her. She’d known Lykae bit and scratched each other during sex. But she’d never imagined that Bowen would want to sink his fangs in her skin, marking her forever—or that he’d lose control over himself so totally. “Honestly, I have no idea. But I could ask the mirror what to do.” He clenched his jaw, clearly struggling with the idea. “What can it tell you?” he finally said. “I usually only get cursory answers. Classic oracular.” He hesitated for long moments, the conflict within him clear on his face. “Ask it, then. Would it be more dangerous to escape me—or to remain within my reach?

Many have questioned how Lyndon Johnson could have put his closest protégé and right hand man John Connally in mortal danger by having him ride with JFK in the presidential limousine in the Dallas motorcade . Indeed, Johnson maneuvered desperately to get Connally moved to the vice-presidential car and substitute his archenemy Yarborough in the presidential vehicle. Senator George Smathers said in his memoirs that JFK complained to him prior to the trip about an effort by LBJ to get first lady Jacqueline Kennedy to ride in the vice presidential car, an idea JFK flatly rejected.39 Shortly before Kennedy’s death in the motorcade LBJ would visit the president’s hotel room and try again to convince him to have Connally and Yarborough swap places. Again, JFK refused, and Johnson stormed from the room after a shouting match.40 The outburst was so loud that first lady Jacqueline Kennedy expressed to her husband that Johnson “sounded mad.”41 Perhaps this explains LBJ’s taciturn behavior from the moment the presidential motorcade left Love Field for Dealey Plaza. An earlier rain had subsided, giving way to sunny skies. The crowds were large and friendly, yet LBJ stared straight ahead and never cracked a smile or waved to the crowds as did Lady Bird, Senator Yarborough, the Connallys, and the Kennedys. LBJ would actually tell Robert Kennedy, “of all things in life, this [campaigning] is what I enjoy most.”42 Normally, the gregarious Johnson would wave his hat, pose and wave to the crowd and shout “howdy,” but on this day he seemed non-expressive and focused. New 3-D imaging analysis and more sophisticated photographic analysis now show without question that LBJ ducked to the floor of his limousine before the first shots were fired.43

Dearest Young, It has been more than 40 years since we communicated. When Aria mentioned that she received your email inquiring after me, I was held speechless for a while. Throughout the years you’ve been on my mind, but I wasn’t sure if it was appropriate to locate you. After our separation, my emotional life went on a roller coaster ride. I could not get you out of my head for several years until I met Toby, my ex, who helped ease my sense of loss – yet, your image continued to haunt my existence often. After Toby I’ve been through several relationships, but they were nothing like those four years we shared. I know it is sentimental of me to drag out our past, but you continue to be on my mind. I have moved forward with my life, and I’m sure you have too. Although I have stored our past into distant memories, there were occasions when your sweetness came rushing head on, like a euphoric air du printemp.

Eve was talking to the horse in low, earnest tones, and the horse gave every appearance of listening raptly. An image of Mildred Staines flashed in Deene’s mind. He’d seen her riding in the park on a pretty bay mare just a few days previous. Mildred sat a horse competently, but there was nothing pretty about the picture. Her habit was fashionable, her horse tidily turned out, her appointments all coordinated for a smart impression, but… Eve was still wearing Deene’s coat, her skirts were rumpled, her boots dusty, and she sported a few wisps of straw in her hair. She stopped to turn the horse the other direction, pausing to pet the beast on his solid shoulder. I could marry her. The thought appeared in Deene’s brain between one instant and the next, complete and compelling. It rapidly began sprouting roots into his common sense. She was wellborn enough. She was pretty enough. She was passionate enough. She was—he forced himself to list this consideration—well dowered enough. And she charmed King William effortlessly. Why not? Little leaves of possibility began twining upward into Deene’s imagination. He knew her family thoroughly and wouldn’t have to deal with any aunts secreted away in Cumbria. He was friends with her brothers, who did not leave bastards all over the shire. The Windham hadn’t been born who lost control when gambling. And Eve Windham was a delightful kisser. Why the hell not? The longer he thought about it, the more patently right the idea became. Eve

Yoko Ono: One Woman Show, 1960-1971,” opening on May 17 in one of MoMA’s prestigious sixth-floor galleries, is a major event of the museum’s summer season. On display will be more than 100 vintage works — and in a few cases, as with the burned canvas, facsimiles — that represent the heyday of Ms. Ono’s first career in art, long overshadowed by her better-known image as pop-culture icon and widow of John Lennon. A great deal is riding on the event — for

If you want to become more confidant, you have to change yourself image

Bright were the memories of his childhood at these docks, to which he had been ever drawn by the allure of the stranger traders as they swung into their berths like weary and weathered heroes returned from some elemental war. In those days it was uncommon to see the galleys of the Freemen Privateers ease into the bay, sleek and riding low with booty. They hailed from such mysterious ports as Filman Orras, Fort By a Half, Dead Man's Story, and exile; names that rang of adventure in the ears of a lad who had never seen his home city from outside its walls. The man slowed as he reached the foot of the stone pier. The years between him and that lad marched through his mind, a possession of martial images growing ever grimmer. If he searched out the many crossroads he had come to in the past, he saw their skies storm-warped, the lands ragged and wind-torn. The forces of age and experience worked on them now, and whatever choices he had made then seemed fated and almost desperate.

The following images for the remaining terms should then be bound in some way to our Mnemonic Unit Nexus (MUN). The next terms to be remembered, and their associated MUs, are: Nucleus – N,C,L – A naked woman, holding cash and covering her privates with leaves Mitochondria –M,I,C – A monkey, frozen in ice, being choked. Golgi Apparatus – G,O, A,P – A little girl with an owl on her right arm, and apple in her left hand, and being patted on the head. Endoplasmic Reticulum – E,D,P,L, R,T,C,U – An Executive, holding a dog, and, wearing no pants, with lash marks on his legs. He is riding a Rhino made of titanium that is standing on a pile of cash and is holding an umbrella for the executives. Smooth Endoplasmic Reticulum, S,M,E,D,P,R,T,C,U – A muddy shovel in the hand of an identical EDPL as shown in the previous image, also riding on the rhino. Thus, on the Rhino, there are seated two EDPLs. Lysosomes – L,I,S,O – A lion, playing a silver guitar, opening a door. Plasma Membrane – P,L,M,B – A priest holding a light bulb in his right hand and a mirror in his left while standing on a pile of bricks. DNA –D,N,A – A dinosaur Cytosol – S,I,T,O – A snake, wearing a tie, with its back end wrapped around a flute and with an orange in its mouth.