Rounding Numbers Quotes

It was all very well going on about pure logic and how the universe was ruled by logic and the harmony of numbers, but the plain fact of the matter was that the Disc was manifestly traversing space on the back of a giant turtle and the gods had a habit of going round to atheists' houses and smashing their windows.

We would not be ashamed of doing some of the things we do in private, if the number of sane human beings who do them in public were large enough.

The media are desperately afraid of being accused of bias. And that's partly because there's a whole machine out there, an organized attempt to accuse them of bias whenever they say anything that the Right doesn't like. So rather than really try to report things objectively, they settle for being even-handed, which is not the same thing. One of my lines in a column—in which a number of people thought I was insulting them personally—was that if Bush said the Earth was flat, the mainstream media would have stories with the headline: 'Shape of Earth—Views Differ.' Then they'd quote some Democrats saying that it was round.

The creator of the universe works in mysterious ways. But he uses a base ten counting system and likes round numbers.

As she turned left to the gateway, it occurred to her that swimming was only one of a very large number of things she had no idea what to do. Peter had been right to object to her ignorance. "It's not that I'm lazy," she explained to Waif as they arrived in what seemed to be stables, "or stupid. I've just not bothered to look round the edges of Mother's way of doing things, you see.

Suit yourself.’ Sadie shouldered her pack, then helped Annabeth up. ‘You say Carter drew a hieroglyph on your boyfriend’s hand. All well and good, but I’d rather stay in touch with you directly.’ Annabeth smirked. ‘You’re right. Can’t trust boys to communicate.’ They exchanged cell-phone numbers. ‘Just don’t call unless it’s urgent,’ Annabeth warned. ‘Cell-phone activity attracts monsters.’ Sadie looked surprised. ‘Really? Never noticed. I suppose I shouldn’t send you any funny-face selfies on Instagram, then.’ ‘Probably not.’ ‘Well, until next time.’ Sadie threw her arms round Annabeth.

The Clock on the Morning Lenape Building Must Clocks be circles? Time is not a circle. Suppose the Mother of All Minutes started right here, on the sidewalk in front of the Morning Lenape Building, and the parade of minutes that followed--each of them, say, one inch long-- headed out that way, down Bridge Street. Where would Now be? This minute? Out past the moon? Jupiter? The nearest star? Who came up with minutes, anyway? Who needs them? Name one good thing a minute's ever done. They shorten fun and measure misery. Get rid of them, I say. Down with minutes! And while you're at it--take hours with you too. Don't get me started on them. Clocks--that's the problem. Every clock is a nest of minutes and hours. Clocks strap us into their shape. Instead of heading for the nearest star, all we do is corkscrew. Clocks lock us into minutes, make Ferris wheel riders of us all, lug us round and round from number to number, dice the time of our lives into tiny bits until the bits are all we know and the only question we care to ask is "What time is it?" As if minutes could tell. As if Arnold could look up at this clock on the Lenape Building and read: 15 Minutes till Found. As if Charlie's time is not forever stuck on Half Past Grace. As if a swarm of stinging minutes waits for Betty Lou to step outside. As if love does not tell all the time the Huffelmeyers need to know.

Wearing a cloak is on Rose's list of the thousand things she hates most. The problem is that each of the thousand problems is ranked number one. 'But Dr. Rannigan says you must and anyway, it hardly weighs a thing, it's so full of holes.' I swung mine round my shoulders. Rose hates any bit of clothing that constricts, but I say Chin up and bear it. Life is just one great constriction. 'Ventilated,' I said, 'that's the word. Our cloaks are terrifically ventilated.

The world is so full of a number of things, I am sure we should all be as happy as kings. The world is full of happiness, and plenty to go round, if you are only willing to take the kind that comes your way.

Driving down deserted early morning roads. Round and round. Round downtown. Through naked streets. Lips pursed on two litre bottles of beer, but pursuing the lips of freedom's night. Swapping cars. Winding up at karaoke bars or Bolsi- the best place in town. For the food. For the folk. For the service. For the crema de papaya. And for that late night dawn's whiskey coffee.

Sitting in the study hall he opened the lid of his desk and changed the number pasted up inside from seventy-seven to seventy-six. But the Christmas vacation was very far away: but one time it would come because the earth moved round always. -Stephen Dedalus-

Heaven, such as it is, is right here on earth. Behold: my revelation: I stand at the door in the morning, and lo, there is a newspaper, in sight like unto an emerald. And holy, holy, holy is the coffee, which was, and is, and is to come. And hark, I hear the voice of an angel round about the radio saying, "Since my baby left me I found a new place to dwell." And lo, after this I beheld a great multitude, which no man could number, of shoes. And after these things I will hasten unto a taxicab and to a theater, where a ticket will be given unto me, and lo, it will be a matinee, and a film that doeth great wonders. And when it is finished, the heavens will open, and out will cometh a rain fragrant as myrrh, and yea, I have an umbrella.

People automatically estimate a mom's IQ at around her children's ages, maybe dividing by the number of kids, rounding up to the nearest pajama size.

I shall be sure to say three dull things as soon as ever I open my mouth, shan’t I? (looking round with the most good-humoured dependence on every body’s assent)— Do not you all think I shall?” Emma could not resist. “Ah! ma’am, but there may be a difficulty. Pardon me— but you will be limited as to number—only three at once.

Upon my return I found the call in my box. It was Anne's number, then Anne's voice on the wire, and, as always, the little leap and plunk in my heart like a frog jumping into a lily pool. With the ripples spreading round.

The new captain looked up. Oh, good grief, Vimes thought. It's bloody Rust this time round! And it was indeed the Hon. Ronald Rust, the god's gift to the enemy, any enemy, and a walking encouragement to desertion. The Rust family had produced great soldiers, by the undemanding standards of 'Deduct your own casualties from those of the enemy, and if the answer is a positive number, it was a glorious victory' school of applied warfare. But Rust's lack of any kind of military grasp was matched only by his high opinion of the talent he in fact possessed only in negative amounts.

Wow. See? You can’t say that’s not impressive.” I recognize the names, even if I don’t know what they all did. “I didn’t.” He reaches for his wallet and pays our admission charge. I try to get it—since it was my idea in the first place—but he insists. “Happy Thanksgiving,” he says, handing me my ticket. “Let’s see some dead people.” We’re greeted by an unimaginable number of domes and columns and arches. Everything is huge and round.

Suppose that, at a given moment, a certain number of people are engaged in the manufacture of pins. They make as many pins as the world needs, working (say) eight hours a day. Someone makes an invention by which the same number of men can make twice as many pins: pins are already so cheap that hardly any more will be bought at a lower price. In a sensible world, everybody concerned in the manufacturing of pins would take to working four hours instead of eight, and everything else would go on as before. But in the actual world this would be thought demoralizing. The men still work eight hours, there are too many pins, some employers go bankrupt, and half the men previously concerned in making pins are thrown out of work. There is, in the end, just as much leisure as on the other plan, but half the men are totally idle while half are still overworked. In this way, it is insured that the unavoidable leisure shall cause misery all round instead of being a universal source of happiness. Can anything more insane be imagined?

She was taking a round of medications, a mystical wheel, the ritualistic design of the hours and days in tablets and capsules, in colors, shapes and numbers.

ABSTRACT THOUGHTS in a blue room; Nominative, genitive, etative, accusative one, accusative two, ablative, partitive, illative, instructive, abessive, adessive, inessive, essive, allative, translative, comitative. Sixteen cases of the Finnish noun. Odd, some languages get by with only singular and plural. The American Indian languages even failed to distinguish number. Except Sioux, in which there was a plural only for animate objects. The blue room was round and warm and smooth. No way to say warm in French. There was only hot and tepid If there's no word for it, how do you think about it? And, if there isn't the proper form, you don't have the how even if you have the words. Imagine, in Spanish having to assign a sex to every object: dog, table, tree, can-opener. Imagine, in Hungarian, not being able to assign a sex to anything: he, she, it all the same word. Thou art my friend, but you are my king; thus the distinctions of Elizabeth the First's English. But with some oriental languages, which all but dispense with gender and number, you are my friend, you are my parent, and YOU are my priest, and YOU are my king, and YOU are my servant, and YOU are my servant whom I'm going to fire tomorrow if YOU don't watch it, and YOU are my king whose policies I totally disagree with and have sawdust in YOUR head instead of brains, YOUR highness, and YOU may be my friend, but I'm still gonna smack YOU up side the head if YOU ever say that to me again; And who the hell are you anyway . . .?

Outright destruction of rebellious ships or habitats - pour encouragez les autres - of course remains an option for the controlling power, but all the usual rules of uprising realpolitik still apply, especially that concerning the peculiar dialectic of dissent which - simply stated - dictates that in all but the most dedicatedly repressive hegemonies, if in a sizable population there are one hundred rebels, all of whom are then rounded up and killed, the number of rebels present at the end of the day is not zero, and not even one hundred, but two hundred or three hundred or more; an equation based on human nature which seems often to baffle the military and political mind.

It stood in the middle of a vast yard behind the terribly strange house. And this tree rose up some one hundred feet in the air, taller than the high roofs and full and round and well branched, and covered all over with rich assortments of red and brown and yellow autumn leaves. "But," whispered Tom, "oh, look. What's up in that tree!" For the Tree was hung with a variety of pumpkins of every shape and size and a number of tints and hues of smoky yellow or bright orange." "A pumpkin tree," someone said. "No," said Tom. The wind blew among the high branches and tossed their bright burdens, softly. "A Halloween Tree," said Tom. And he was right.

So you don’t fancy meeting up again?’ Max persisted, though Neve didn’t know why, because she thought she’d made her position perfectly clear. ‘Swap war stories?’ ‘I don’t have any war stories,’ Neve said, and in that moment she felt that she never would. That every night would be spent creeping round her flat in her socks with the telly turned down so low that she could barely hear it, so in the end she’d have no other option but to escape into the pages of books where there were other girls falling in and out of love but not her. Never her. She stared down at the scuffed toes of her faux Ugg boots in sudden and tired defeat. ‘If you don’t have any war stories, then at least you don’t have any war wounds,’ Max said, so quietly that Neve had to strain her ears to catch his words. ‘Take my number.

Buttercup could picture Westley rounding the final corner. There were four guards outside waiting. At ten seconds per guard, she began figuring, but then stopped, because numbers had always been her enemy. She looked down at her hands. Oh, I hope he still thinks I’m pretty, she thought; those nightmares took a lot out of me.

Whenever a person says to you that they are as innocent as lambs in all concerning money, look well after your own money, for they are dead certain to collar it, if they can. Whenever a person proclaims to you 'In worldly matters I'm a child,' you consider that that person is only a crying off from being held accountable, and that you have got that person's number, and it's Number One. Now, I am not a poetical man myself, except in a vocal way, when it goes round a company, but I'm a practical one, and that's my experience. So's this rule. Fast and loose in one thing, Fast and loose in everything. I never knew it fail. No more will you. Nor no one.

A seductive female voice added, “Hello Henry, I’m the deputy director. But you can call me Samantha.” Henry’s response was accusing. “You’re a droid!” “I’m an R9054, one of the most powerful robotic systems devised by Ingermann-Verex, my makers. And I prefer the term humanoid if you don’t mind.” Locking onto her image, Henry noted the strange wrap-round view panel enshrouding the top part of the body shell. Inside, there was a human face seemingly trapped inside an electronic body. Although he’d seen a number of droids with similar face screens, Samantha’s was the most realistic, so he guessed her claims of being top of her range were probably right.

Why does everyone else always guess round numbers? They’re not any more likely.

As I have earlier noted, the most important things in life and in business can’t be measured. The trite bromide 'If you can measure it, you can manage it' has been a hindrance in the building a great real-world organization, just as it has been a hindrance in evaluating the real-world economy. It is character, not numbers, that make the world go ‘round. How can we possibly measure the qualities of human existence that give our lives and careers meaning? How about grace, kindness, and integrity? What value do we put on passion, devotion, and trust? How much do cheerfulness, the lilt of a human voice, and a touch of pride add to our lives? Tell me, please, if you can, how to value friendship, cooperation, dedication, and spirit. Categorically, the firm that ignores the intangible qualities that the human beings who are our colleagues bring to their careers will never build a great workforce or a great organization.

Life had a way of wrecking her careful plans, again and again. Roulette was more predictable than life. Small wonder she was so lucky at it. Life was not a wheel going round and round. It never, ever returned to the same place. It didn't stick to simple red and black and a certain array of numbers. It laughed at logic. Beneath its pretty overdress of man-imposed order, life was anarchy.

V? Answer the question or so help me God I'll beat it out of you." "I just know how to find him." "What are you hiding?" V went over to the bar, poured himself a couple of fingers of Grey Goose, and hammered the shot. He swallowed a number of times and then let the words fly. "I fed him." A chorus of inhales floated a...round the room. As Wrath rose in disbelief, V poured himself another hit of Goose. "You did what?" The last word was bellowed. "I had him drink some of me." "Vishous..." Wrath stalked around the desk, shitkickers hitting the floor like boulders. The king got face-to-face close. "He's a male. He's human. What the fuck were you thinking?" More vodka. Definitely time for more Goose.

Leave Crete and sweep to this blest temple Where apple-orchard's elegance Is yours, and smouldering altars, ample Frankincense. Here under boughs a bracing spring Percolates, roses without number Umber the earth and, rustling, The leaves drip slumber. Here budding flowers possess a sunny Pasture where steeds could graze their fill, And the breeze feels as gentle as honey... Kypris, here in the present blend Your nectar with pure festal glee. Fill gilded bowls and pass them round Lavinshly.

And perhaps Solaris is the cradle of your divine child," Snow went on, with a widening grin that increased the number of lines round his eyes. Solaris could be the first phase of the despairing God. Perhaps its intelligence will grow enormously. All the contents of our Solarist libraries could be just a record of his teething troubles…

That was only the beginning of the Nazi “Production Schedule.” Three hundred and sixty corpses every half hour, which was all the time it took to reduce human flesh to ashes, made 720 per hour, or 17,280 corpses per twenty-four hour shift. And the ovens, with murderous efficiency, functioned day and night. However, one must also take into account the death pits, which could destroy another 8,000 cadavers a day. In round numbers, about 24,000 corpses were handled each day. An admirable production record—one that speaks well for German industry.

It was as easy as breathing to go and have tea near the place where Jane Austen had so wittily scribbled and so painfully died. One of the things that causes some critics to marvel at Miss Austen is the laconic way in which, as a daughter of the epoch that saw the Napoleonic Wars, she contrives like a Greek dramatist to keep it off the stage while she concentrates on the human factor. I think this comes close to affectation on the part of some of her admirers. Captain Frederick Wentworth in Persuasion, for example, is partly of interest to the female sex because of the 'prize' loot he has extracted from his encounters with Bonaparte's navy. Still, as one born after Hiroshima I can testify that a small Hampshire township, however large the number of names of the fallen on its village-green war memorial, is more than a world away from any unpleasantness on the European mainland or the high or narrow seas that lie between. (I used to love the detail that Hampshire's 'New Forest' is so called because it was only planted for the hunt in the late eleventh century.) I remember watching with my father and brother through the fence of Stanstead House, the Sussex mansion of the Earl of Bessborough, one evening in the early 1960s, and seeing an immense golden meadow carpeted entirely by grazing rabbits. I'll never keep that quiet, or be that still, again. This was around the time of countrywide protest against the introduction of a horrible laboratory-confected disease, named 'myxomatosis,' into the warrens of old England to keep down the number of nibbling rodents. Richard Adams's lapine masterpiece Watership Down is the remarkable work that it is, not merely because it evokes the world of hedgerows and chalk-downs and streams and spinneys better than anything since The Wind in the Willows, but because it is only really possible to imagine gassing and massacre and organized cruelty on this ancient and green and gently rounded landscape if it is organized and carried out against herbivores.

After a while he became disagreeably affected by the sight of the roadway thronged with vehicles and of the pavement crowded with men and women. He was in a long, straight street, peopled by a mere fraction of an immense multitude; but all round him, on and on, even to the limits of the horizon hidden by the enormous piles of bricks, he felt the mass of mankind mighty in its numbers. They swarmed numerous like locusts, industrious like ants, thoughtless like a natural force, pushing on blind and orderly and absorbed, impervious to sentiment, to logic, to terror, too, perhaps. That was the form of doubt he feared most. Impervious to fear! Often while walking abroad, when he happened also to come out of himself, he had such moments of dreadful and sane mistrust of mankind. What if nothing could move them ? Such moments come to all men whose ambition aims at a direct grasp upon humanity -- to artists, politicians, thinkers, reformers, or saints. A despicable emotional state this, against which solitude fortifies a superior character.

On January 18, 1897, Indiana state representative Taylor I. Record argued in favor of changing the value of pi. Pi, which can be rounded to 3.14159, is the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter. Tyler believed that the number was inconveniently long; in House Bill 246, he asked that it be rounded up to 3.2. The bill passed the House but was defeated in the Senate when the chairman of Purdue University’s math department successfully pleaded that it would make Indiana a national laughingstock. The value of pi in Indiana remains the same as in every other state.

Why Does He Do That? That's the number one question, isn't it? Maybe it's his drinking, you say. Maybe it's his learning disabilities. It's his job; he hates it. He's stressed. I think he's bipolar. It's his mother's fault; she spoiled him rotten. It's the drugs. If only he didn't use. It's his temper. He's selfish. It's the pornography; he's obsessed. The list could go on and on. You could spend many years trying to pinpoint it and never get a definite answer. The fact is, many people have these problems and they aren't abusive. Just because someone is an alcoholic doesn't mean he is abusive. Men hate their jobs all the time and aren't abusive. Bipolar? Okay. Stressed? Who isn't! Do you see where I am going with this? Off the subject a bit, when someone commits a violent crime, they always report in the news about his possible motive. As human beings, we need to somehow make sense of things. If someone murders someone, do you think it makes the family of the victim feel better to know the murderer's motive? No. Except for self-defense, there really is no excuse for murder. Motive, if there is any, is irrelevant. The same is true of abuse. You could spend your whole life going round and round trying to figure out why. The truth is, the why doesn't matter. There are only two reasons why men commit abuse—because they want to do so and because they can. You want to know why. In many ways, you might feel like you need to know. But, if you could come up with a reason or a motive, it wouldn't help you. Maybe you believe that if you did this or that differently, he wouldn't have abused you. That is faulty thinking and won't help you get better. You didn't do anything to cause the abuse. No matter what you said, no matter what you did, you didn't deserve to be abused. You are the victim and it won't help you to know why he supposedly abused you. No matter what his reason, there is no excuse for abuse. You are not to blame.

Levin had often noticed in arguments between even the most intelligent people that after enormous efforts, an enormous number of logical subtleties and words, the arguers would finally come to the awareness that what they had spent so long struggling to prove to each other had been known to them long, long before, from the beginning of the argument, but that they loved different things and therefore did not want to name what they loved, so as not to be challenged. He had often felt that sometimes during an argument you would understand what your opponent loves, and suddenly come to love the same thing yourself, and agree all at once, and then all reasonings would fall away as superfluous; and sometimes it was the other way round: you would finally say what you yourself love, for the sake of which you are inventing your reasonings, and if you happened to say it well and sincerely, the opponent would suddenly agree and stop arguing. That was the very thing he wanted to say.

This is my friend Veronica,” I told him. “And this is Kaidan.” “Oh, I've heard all about you.” Veronica gave him a big smile. His brow elevated, but he didn't take the bait. Instead, he stared at me funny. “Nice wart.” Leaning forward without touching me, he flicked the wart from the tip of my nose. Veronica let out a loud cackle, proving she should be the one in my costume. “I told you it was stupid!” She gloated. With my pointer finger, I moved the paint around my nose to fill in the blank spot. When I finished, he was still watching me. “Your hair's grown a lot,” I said to him. “So has your bottom.” My eyes rounded and blood rushed to my face. Veronica hooted with hilarity, bending at the waist. Even Jay let out a loud snicker, the traitor. I wished Kaidan weren't so perceptive, but it was true. The feminine curves that had always eluded me were finally making an appearance. Stupid tight dress. “Dude, you can get away with anything,” said the pirate to the straight-faced ape. “I meant it as a compliment.” “That was awesome.” Veronica grabbed Jay by the hand. “Come on. Let's go find me a drink.” She winked at me as they ambled away. I gave my attention to the dry, trampled grass and scattered cans for a moment before working up the nerve to say something. “My dad gave me a cell phone.” And a car. And a ton of money. Kaidan set the ape head on the ground and pulled his phone from a fuzzy pocket, blowing off brown lint. Then he held his furry thumbs above the buttons and nodded at me. I started to give him my number, but his brow creased in frustration with the big, costumed hands. “Here,” I said, taking his phone. Saving my number for him gave me a thrill.

[F]or time itself is conceived as 'coming round'; and this again because time and such a standard rotation mutually determine each other. Hence, to call the happenings of a thing a circle is saying that there is a sort of circle of time; and that is because it is measured by a complete revolution, and the whole measurement of a thing is nought else but a defined number of the units of its measurements.

Chang! With light and sound and numbers round and round in a whirlwind, and maybe you win with what you end up with and maybe you lose and have to play again. Pay the man for another spin, son, pay the man.

The moments that followed were full of interest. A stillness, a brooding, expectant stillness, fell upon the company—and it numbered a round dozen—about Lord Gervase's richly appointed board. In the soft candlelight the oval table

I am forever busy working, because I want to work until get a personal call from the bank. Telling me that they cant add more zeros in my account. The number is too long , that they have rounded it off, but still cant add more digits to it.

But do you know what happened during this period? Where do we begin ... 1.3 million Americans died while fighting nine major wars. Roughly 99.9% of all companies that were created went out of business. Four U.S. presidents were assassinated. 675,000 Americans died in a single year from a flu pandemic. 30 separate natural disasters killed at least 400 Americans each. 33 recessions lasted a cumulative 48 years. The number of forecasters who predicted any of those recessions rounds to zero. The stock market fell more than 10% from a recent high at least 102 times. Stocks lost a third of their value at least 12 times. Annual inflation exceeded 7% in 20 separate years. The words “economic pessimism” appeared in newspapers at least 29,000 times, according to Google.

These are the Cluster B personality disorders, and based on the statistics above, they are found in more than one in every seven people—over 15 percent of the population (I’m rounding down, to account for comorbidity). Now consider that most of these people are highly functional, nonincarcerated, active members of society. So given the raw numbers, it’s highly likely that you unknowingly pass by one of these cunning manipulators every day on your way to work—perhaps even today, when they served you your morning coffee. So what’s the problem? The problem is that the general public knows virtually nothing about these incredibly pervasive disorders.

Mr. Rochester had again summoned the ladies round him, and was selecting certain of their number to be of his party. “Miss Ingram is mine, of course,” said he: afterwards he named the two Misses Eshton, and Mrs. Dent. He looked at me: I happened to be near him, as I had been fastening

He watched their flight; bird after bird: a dark flash, a swerve, a flutter of wings. He tried to count them before all their darting quivering bodies passed: six, ten, eleven: and wondered were they odd or even in number. Twelve, thirteen: for two came wheeling down from the upper sky. They were flying high and low but ever round and round in straight and curving lines and ever flying from left to right, circling about a temple of air.

The tree blossoms, and bears its fruit, which falls, rots, withers, and even the seed is lost! Go, count the rings of the oak and of the sycamore; the lie in circles, one about another, until the eye is blinded in striving to make out their numbers; and yet a full change of the seasons comes round while the stem is winding one of those little lines about itself, like the buffalo changing his coat, or the buck his horns; and what does it all amount to? There does the noble tree fill its place in the forest, loftier, and grander, and richer, and more difficult to imitate, than any of your pitiful pillars, for a thousand years, until the time which the Lord hath given it is full. Then come the winds, that you cannot see, to rive its bark; and the waters from the heavens, to soften its pores; and the rot, which all can feel and none can understand, to humble its pride and bring it to the ground. From that moment its beauty begins to perish. It lies another hundred years; a mouldering log, and then a mound of moss and earth; a sad effigy of a human grave.

Paul Buchheit: I'm suddenly reminded that, for a while, I asked people if they were playing Russian Roulette with a gun with a billion barrels (or some huge number, so in other words, some low probability that they would actually be killed), how much would they have to be paid to play one round? A lot of people were almost offended by the question and they'd say, "I wouldn't do it at any price." But, of course, we do that everyday. They drive to work in cars to earn money and they are taking risks all the time, but they don't like to acknowledge that they are taking risks. They want to pretend that everything is risk-free.

One of the most extraordinary stories of reframing is that of Roger Bannister, the first person to run a mile in less than four minutes. Bannister was a medical school student who couldn’t afford a trainer or a special runner’s diet. He didn’t even have time to run more than thirty minutes a day, squeezed in around his medical studies. Yet Bannister did not focus on all the reasons why he logically had no chance of reaching his goal. He instead refocused on accomplishing his goal in his own way. On the morning he made world history, he got up, ate his usual breakfast, did his required hospital rounds, and then caught a bus to the track.

These are among the people I've tried to know twice, the second time in memory and language. Through them, myself. They are what I've become, in ways I don't understand but which I believe will accrue to a rounded truth, a second life for me as well as them. Cracking jokes in the mandatory American manner of people self-concious about death. This is the humor of violent surprise. How do you connect things? Learn their names. It was a strange conversation, full of hedged remarks and obscure undercurrents, perfect in its way. I was not a happy runner. I did it to stay interested in my body, to stay informed, and to set up clear lines of endeavor, a standard to meet, a limit to stay within. I was just enough of a puritan to think there must be some virtue in rigorous things, although I was careful not to overdo it. I never wore the clothes. the shorts, tank top, high socks. Just running shoes and a lightweight shirt and jeans. I ran disguised as an ordinary person. -When are you two going to have children? -We're our own children. In novels lately the only real love, the unconditional love I ever come across is what people feel for animals. Dolphins, bears, wolves, canaries. I would avoid people, stop drinking. There was a beggar with a Panasonic. This is what love comes down to, things that happen and what we say about them. But nothing mattered so much on this second reading as a number of spirited misspellings. I found these mangled words exhilarating. He'd made them new again, made me see how they worked, what they really were. They were ancient things, secret, reshapable.The only safety is in details. Hardship makes the world obscure. How else could men love themselves but in memory, knowing what they know? The world has become self-referring. You know this. This thing has seeped into the texture of the world. The world for thousands of years was our escape, was our refuge. Men hid from themselves in the world. We hid from God or death. The world was where we lived, the self was where we went mad and died. But now the world has made a self of its own.

From the dawn of civilization, human beings have tried to find out order in the chaotic world surrounding them. It has however never been easy to find a solution to explain a given system while being a part of that system. The best bet is to find out the most fundamental components within the system and building a theory round these. In other words, a theory that is able to describe the world in totality has to keep the number of basic postulates it depends upon to zero or near zero.

A child is born with no state of mind Blind to the ways of mankind God is smilin' on you but he's frownin' too Because only God knows what you'll go through You'll grow in the ghetto livin' second-rate And your eyes will sing a song called deep hate The places you play and where you stay Looks like one great big alleyway You'll admire all the number-book takers Thugs, pimps and pushers and the big money-makers Drivin' big cars, spendin' twenties and tens And you'll wanna grow up to be just like them, huh Smugglers, scramblers, burglars, gamblers Pickpocket peddlers, even panhandlers You say I'm cool, huh, I'm no fool But then you wind up droppin' outta high school Now you're unemployed, all non-void Walkin' round like you're Pretty Boy Floyd Turned stick-up kid, but look what you done did Got sent up for a eight-year bid Now your manhood is took and you're a Maytag Spend the next two years as a undercover fag Bein' used and abused to serve like hell 'til one day, you was found hung dead in the cell It was plain to see that your life was lost You was cold and your body swung back and forth But now your eyes sing the sad, sad song Of how you lived so fast and died so young

But when we watch the ants round their ruined heap, the tenacity, energy, and immense number of the delving insects prove that despite the destruction of the heap, something indestructible, which though intangible is the real strength of the colony, still exists; and similarly, though in Moscow in the month of October there was no government and no churches, shrines, riches, or houses—it was still the Moscow it had been in August. All was destroyed, except something intangible yet powerful and indestructible.

The world, he now perceived, was in fact a great, flat wheel with a myriad spokes of water, trees and grass, for ever turning and turning beneath the sun and moon. At each spoke was an animal-all the animals and birds he had ever known-horses, dogs, chaffinches, mice, hedgehogs,rabbits, cows, sheep, rooks and many more which he did not recognize-a huge, striped cat, and a monstrous fish spurting water in a fountain to the sky. At the centre, on the axle itself, stood a man, who ceaselessly lashed and lashed the creatures with a whip to make them drive the wheel round. Some shrieked aloud as they bled and struggled, others silently toppled and were trodden down beneath their comrades' stumbling feet. And yet, as he himself could see, the man had misconceived his task, for in fact the wheel turned of itself and all he needed to do was to keep it balanced upon its delicate axle by adjusting, as might be necessary, the numbers of animals upon this side and that. The great fish poured blood as the man pierced it with a flying spear which exploded within its body. The striped cat melted, diminishing slowly to the size of a mouse; and a great, grey beast with a long trunk cried piteously as the man tore its white tusks out of its face. Still on towards the wheel he circled, and between him and the wheel Mr. Ephraim called him silently to fellowship with the dead.

Meantime, Mr. Rochester had again summoned the ladies round him, and was selecting certain of their number to be of his party. “Miss Ingram is mine, of course,” said he: afterwards he named the two Misses Eshton, and Mrs. Dent. He looked at me: I happened to be near him, as I had been fastening the clasp of Mrs. Dent’s bracelet, which had got loose.

And then suddenly I hear his footsteps approaching. He’s behind me, thirty feet away, at a guess. No wonder I couldn’t see him. I should turn. Right now I should turn. This is the moment that it would be natural to swivel round and greet him. Call out a hello; wave my phone in the air. But my feet are rooted to the spot. I can’t bring myself to move. Because as soon as I do, it will be time to be polite and matter-of-fact and back to normal. And I can’t bear that. I want to stay here. In the place where we can say anything to each other. In the magic spell. Sam pauses, right behind me. There’s an unbearable fragile beat as I wait for him to shatter the quiet. But it’s as though he feels the same way. He says nothing. All I can hear is the gentle sound of his breathing. Slowly, his arms wrap round me from behind. I close my eyes and lean back against his chest, feeling unreal.

The moon’s distance from the earth is, in round numbers, 240,000 miles.

The houses round here don’t have numbers. They’re too fucking posh for that.

I'm cracking up in this fucking Fishbinder Problem Box. A terrible seizure is coming on, I can feel its sinister pulsation creeping up my spine as I gnaw my tail apprehensively, grinding my teeth with anxiety, wishing I had some DDT to drown these rats in misery, repetitive cycles of poetry, symptoms of psychotic activity, rhyming of lines endlessly, results in Mazes D and E, dervish spinning round me vis-a-vis, Poole, Broome, Helvicki, help me, please, somebody, take a look at my pedigree, Albino Number 243, Doctor of Psychology, rashes, warts, and a small goatee, expert in lobotomy, performed six times on a chimpanzee, sweet land of liberty, Jesus this is agony, poisonous snake subfamily, here he comes after me!

I have said that in one respect my mind has changed during the last twenty or thirty years. Up to the age of thirty, or beyond it, poetry of many kinds, such as the works of Milton, Gray, Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley, gave me great pleasure, and even as a schoolboy I took intense delight in Shakespeare, especially in the historical plays. I have also said that formerly pictures gave me considerable, and music very great delight. But now for many years I cannot endure to read a line of poetry: I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me. I have also almost lost my taste for pictures or music. Music generally sets me thinking too energetically on what I have been at work on, instead of giving me pleasure. I retain some taste for fine scenery, but it does not cause me the exquisite delight which it formerly did. On the other hand, novels which are works of the imagination, though not of a very high order, have been for years a wonderful relief and pleasure to me, and I often bless all novelists. A surprising number have been read aloud to me, and I like all if moderately good, and if they do not end unhappily–against which a law ought to be passed. A novel, according to my taste, does not come into the first class unless it contains some person whom one can thoroughly love, and if a pretty woman all the better. This curious and lamentable loss of the higher aesthetic tastes is all the odder, as books on history, biographies, and travels (independently of any scientific facts which they may contain), and essays on all sorts of subjects interest me as much as ever they did. My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts, but why this should have caused the atrophy of that part of the brain alone, on which the higher tastes depend, I cannot conceive. A man with a mind more highly organised or better constituted than mine, would not, I suppose, have thus suffered; and if I had to live my life again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week; for perhaps the parts of my brain now atrophied would thus have been kept active through use. The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.

Lovely and unremarkable, the clutter of mugs and books, the almost-empty Fig Newtons box, thick dishes in a big tin tray, the knife still standing in the butter, change like the color of river water in the delicate shift to day. Thin fog veils the hedges, where a neighbor dog makes rounds. 'Go to bed. It doesn't matter about the washing-up. Take this book along.' Whatever it was we said that night is gone, framed like a photograph nobody took. Stretched out on a camp cot with the book, I think that we will talk all night again, there, or another where, but I am wrong.

Seventy years I regard as the limit of the life of man. In these seventy years are contained, without reckoning intercalary months, twenty-five thousand and two hundred days. Add an intercalary month to every other year, that the seasons may come round at the right time, and there will be, besides the seventy years, thirty-five such months, making an addition of one thousand and fifty days. The whole number of the days contained in the seventy years will thus be twenty-six thousand two hundred and fifty, whereof not one but will produce events unlike the rest. Hence man is wholly accident.

And what percentage of people take up the option to die off?’ She looked at me, her glance telling me to be calm. ‘Oh, a hundred per cent, of course. Over many thousands of years, calculated by old time, of course. But yes, everyone takes the option, sooner or later.’ ‘So it’s just like the first time round? You always die in the end?’ ‘Yes, except don’t forget the quality of life here is much better. People die when they decide they’ve had enough, not before. The second time round it’s altogether more satisfying because it’s willed.’ She paused, then added, ‘As I say, we cater for what people want.’ I hadn’t been blaming her. I’m not that sort. I just wanted to find out how the system worked. ‘So … even people, religious people, who come here to worship God throughout eternity … they end up throwing in the towel after a few years, hundred years, thousand years?’ ‘Certainly. As I said, there are still a few Old Heaveners around, but their numbers are diminishing all the time.

When I was a med student, the first patient I met with this sort of problem was a sixty-two-year-old man with a brain tumor. We strolled into his room on morning rounds, and the resident asked him, “Mr. Michaels, how are you feeling today?” “Four six one eight nineteen!” he replied, somewhat affably. The tumor had interrupted his speech circuitry, so he could speak only in streams of numbers, but he still had prosody, he could still emote: smile, scowl, sigh. He recited another series of numbers, this time with urgency. There was something he wanted to tell us, but the digits could communicate nothing other than his fear and fury. The team prepared to leave the room; for some reason, I lingered. “Fourteen one two eight,” he pleaded with me, holding my hand. “Fourteen one two eight.” “I’m sorry.” “Fourteen one two eight,” he said mournfully, staring into my eyes. And then I left to catch up to the team. He died a few months later, buried with whatever message he had for the world.

By the age of twelve, he was using the family typewriter to correspond with a number of well-known local geologists about the rock formations he had studied in Central Park. Not aware of his youth, one of these correspondents nominated Robert for membership in the New York Mineralogical Club, and soon thereafter a letter arrived inviting him to deliver a lecture before the club. Dreading the thought of having to talk to an audience of adults, Robert begged his father to explain that they had invited a twelve-year-old. Greatly amused, Julius encouraged his son to accept this honor. On the designated evening, Robert showed up at the club with his parents, who proudly introduced their son as “J. Robert Oppenheimer.” The startled audience of geologists and amateur rock collectors burst out laughing when he stepped up to the podium; a wooden box had to be found for him to stand on so that the audience could see more than the shock of his wiry black hair sticking up above the lectern. Shy and awkward, Robert nevertheless read his prepared remarks and was given a hearty round of applause. Julius

How could any number of people—all together—know enough? It reminded Seldon of a puzzle that had been presented to him when he was young: Can you have a relatively small piece of platinum, with handholds affixed, that could not be lifted by the bare, unaided strength of any number of people, no matter how many? The answer was yes. A cubic meter of platinum weighs 22,420 kilograms under standard gravitational pull. If it is assumed that each person could heave 120 kilograms up from the ground, then 188 people would suffice to lift the platinum. —But you could not squeeze 188 people around the cubic meter so that each one could get a grip on it. You could perhaps not squeeze more than 9 people around it. And levers or other such devices were not allowed. It had to be “bare, unaided strength.” In the same way, it could be that there was no way of getting enough people to handle the total amount of knowledge required for psychohistory, even if the facts were stored in computers rather than in individual human brains. Only so many people could gather round the knowledge, so to speak, and communicate it.

The Weinberg–Salam theory exhibits a property known as spontaneous symmetry breaking. This means that what appear to be a number of completely different particles at low energies are in fact found to be all the same type of particle, only in different states. At high energies all these particles behave similarly. The effect is rather like the behavior of a roulette ball on a roulette wheel. At high energies (when the wheel is spun quickly) the ball behaves in essentially only one way – it rolls round and round. But as the wheel slows, the energy of the ball decreases, and eventually the ball drops into one of the thirty-seven slots in the wheel. In other words, at low energies there are thirty-seven different states in which the ball can exist. If, for some reason, we could only observe the ball at low energies, we would then think that there were thirty-seven different types of ball!

(For the record, the number of actual “righteous Gentiles” officially recognized by Yad Vashem, Israel’s national Holocaust museum and research center, for their efforts in rescuing Jews from the Holocaust is under 30,000 people, out of a European population at the time of nearly 300 million—or .001 percent. Even if we were to assume that the official recognition is an undercount by a factor of ten thousand, such people remain essentially a rounding error.)

They’re into a bit more than assassination,” said the Admiral, aka Mr Brown, “and not all of them are top agents—the ones that use the names of gods and goddesses to identify themselves. Some are called daemons, and they serve as apprentices to the top players. They’ve a large number of people in the mix. Same arrangement. A team of professional killers, safe crackers, explosives—you name it —round each one, and they’re not afraid to sacrifice members for the objective, or to protect the goddess or god heading it. Every time we get close to them we lose people. It’s as if they’re playing with us. We’re pretty sure they’re all very well connected, and some of them indulge in what they call ‘hunting’. Some poor bastard is abducted and dumped somewhere remote without the means to defend himself. Then he or she is hunted by one or more of the Pantheon. They’re psychopaths—but, as I said, they’re very well connected.

The vulgar modern argument used against religion, and lately against common decency, would be absolutely fatal to any idea of liberty. It is perpetually said that because there are a hundred religions claiming to be true, it is therefore impossible that one of them should really be true. The argument would appear on the face of it to be illogical, if anyone nowadays troubled about logic. It would be as reasonable to say that because some people thought the earth was flat, and others (rather less incorrectly) imagined it was round, and because anybody is free to say that it is triangular or hexagonal, or a rhomboid, therefore it has no shape at all; or its shape can never be discovered; and, anyhow, modern science must be wrong in saying it is an oblate spheroid. The world must be some shape, and it must be that shape and no other; and it is not self-evident that nobody can possibly hit on the right one. What so obviously applies to the material shape of the world equally applies to the moral shape of the universe. The man who describes it may not be right, but it is no argument against his rightness that a number of other people must be wrong.

Miss Spink and Miss Forcible lived in the flat below Coraline’s, on the ground floor. They were both old and round, and they lived in their flat with a number of ageing Highland terriers who had names like Hamish and Andrew and Jock.

On Ponkawtasset, since, we took our way, Down this still stream we took our meadowy way, A poet wise has settled, whose fine ray Doth faintly shine on Concord's twilight day. Like those first stars, whose silver beams on high, Shining more brightly as the day goes by, Most travellers cannot at first descry, But eyes that wont to range the evening sky, And know celestial lights, do plainly see, And gladly hail them, numbering two or three; For lore that's deep must deeply studied be, As from deep wells men read star-poetry. These stars are never pal'd, though out of sight, But like the sun they shine forever bright; Aye, they are suns, though earth must in its flight Put out its eyes that it may see their light. Who would neglect the least celestial sound, Or faintest light that falls on earthly ground, If he could know it one day would be found That star in Cygnus whither we are bound, And pale our sun with heavenly radiance round?

The clocks are on the stroke of three, and the furrow ploughed among the populace is turning round, to come on into the place of execution, and end. The ridges thrown to this side and to that, now crumble in and close behind the last plough as it passes on, for all are following to the Guillotine. In front of it, seated in chairs, as in a garden of public diversion, are a number of women, busily knitting. On one of the fore-most chairs, stands The Vengeance, looking about for her friend.

Eva will be impressed, too. Bet you’re counting on that heading into the weekend.” Damn right. I would need all the points I could earn when I met up with Eva in San Diego. “She’s about to go out of town. And you have to head into the conference room before they get too restless in there. I’ll join you as soon as I can.” He stood. “Yes, I heard. Your mother’s here. Let the wedding insanity begin. Since you’re free this weekend, how about we round up some of the usual suspects at my place tonight? It’s been a while, and your bachelor days are numbered. Well, technically they’re over, but no one else knows that.” And he was bound by attorney-client privilege. It took me a beat to decide. “All right. What time?” “Eight-ish.” I nodded, then caught Scott’s eye. He got

Say!” Benedict exclaimed. “Why don’t you save her, Hastings?” Simon took one look at Lady Bridgerton (who at that point had her hand firmly wrapped around Macclesfield’s forearm) and decided he’d rather be branded an eternal coward. “Since we haven’t been introduced, I’m sure it would be most improper,” he improvised. “I’m sure it wouldn’t,” Anthony returned. “You’re a duke.” “So?” “So?” Anthony echoed. “Mother would forgive any impropriety if it meant gaining an audience for Daphne with a duke.” “Now look here,” Simon said hotly, “I’m not some sacrificial lamb to be slaughtered on the altar of your mother.” “You have spent a lot of time in Africa, haven’t you?” Colin quipped. Simon ignored him. “Besides, your sister said—” All three Bridgerton heads swung round in his direction. Simon immediately realized he’d blundered. Badly. “You’ve met Daphne?” Anthony queried, his voice just a touch too polite for Simon’s comfort. Before Simon could even reply, Benedict leaned in ever-so-slightly closer, and asked, “Why didn’t you mention this?” “Yes,” Colin said, his mouth utterly serious for the first time that evening. “Why?” Simon glanced from brother to brother and it became perfectly clear why Daphne must still be unmarried. This belligerent trio would scare off all but the most determined— or stupid— of suitors. Which would probably explain Nigel Berbrooke. “Actually,” Simon said, “I bumped into her in the hall as I was making my way into the ballroom. It was”— he glanced rather pointedly at the Bridgertons—“ rather obvious that she was a member of your family, so I introduced myself.” Anthony turned to Benedict. “Must have been when she was fleeing Berbrooke.” Benedict turned to Colin. “What did happen to Berbrooke? Do you know?” Colin shrugged. “Haven’t the faintest. Probably left to nurse his broken heart.” Or broken head, Simon thought acerbically. “Well, that explains everything, I’m sure,” Anthony said, losing his overbearing big-brother expression and looking once again like a fellow rake and best friend. “Except,” Benedict said suspiciously, “why he didn’t mention it.” “Because I didn’t have the chance,” Simon bit off, about ready to throw his arms up in exasperation. “In case you hadn’t noticed, Anthony, you have a ridiculous number of siblings, and it takes a ridiculous amount of time to be introduced to all of them.” “There are only two of us present,” Colin pointed out. “I’m going home,” Simon announced. “The three of you are mad.” Benedict, who had seemed to be the most protective of the brothers, suddenly grinned. “You don’t have a sister, do you?” “No, thank God.

Noise was on her list of slave sins, which we knew by heart. Number one: stealing. Number two: disobedience. Number three: laziness. Number four: noise. A slave was supposed to be like the Holy Ghost—don’t see it, don’t hear it, but it’s always hovering round on ready.

Friends, Grecian Heroes, Ministers of Mars! Grievous, and all unlook’d for, is the blow Which Jove hath dealt me; by his promise led I hop’d to raze the strong-built walls of Troy, And home return in safety; but it seems 130 He falsifies his word, and bids me now Return to Argos, frustrate of my hope, Dishonour’d, and with grievous loss of men. Such now appears th’ o’er-ruling sov’reign will Of Saturn’s son; who oft hath sunk the heads 135 Of many a lofty city in the dust, And yet will sink; for mighty is his hand. ’Tis shame indeed that future days should hear How such a force as ours, so great, so brave, Hath thus been baffled, fighting, as we do, 140 ’Gainst numbers far inferior to our own, And see no end of all our warlike toil. For should we choose, on terms of plighted truce, Trojans and Greeks, to number our array; Of Trojans, all that dwell within the town, 145 And we, by tens disposed, to every ten, To crown our cups, one Trojan should assign, Full many a ten no cup-bearer would find: So far the sons of Greece outnumber all That dwell within the town; but to their aid 150 Bold warriors come from all the cities round, Who greatly harass me, and render vain My hope to storm the strong-built walls of Troy. Already now nine weary years have pass’d; The timbers of our ships are all decay’d, 155 The cordage rotted; in our homes the while Our wives and helpless children sit, in vain Expecting our return; and still the work, For which we hither came, remains undone. Hear then my counsel; let us all agree 160 Home to direct our course, since here in vain We strive to take the well-built walls of Troy.” Thus as he spoke, the crowd, that had not heard The secret council, by his words was mov’d; So sway’d and heav’d the multitude, as when 165 O’er the vast billows of th’ Icarian sea Eurus and Notus from the clouds of Heav’n Pour forth their fury; or as some deep field Of wavy corn, when sweeping o’er the plain The ruffling west wind sways the

Four construction workers sit around four greasy bowls in silence. The cook, an old man who died several days ago, has been allowed to rot on his stool. The single round light is dappled with the bodies of dead insects, and the walls are decorated with spatters and dribbles of grease.

Many people are bothered about the number of privately owned guns in the United States, but what about publicly owned ones? In recent years the United States government (not the military) has purchased 1.6 billion rounds of ammunition, enough to shoot the entire population five times over.

Bloodworth was not fooled, he had these folks' number, he'd been reading their mail walking a lifetime in their shoes. Beyond the mothriddled light their faces were rapt and transfixed, he sang about death as if it was the only kept promise out of all life's false starts and switchbacks, all there was at the end of the dusty road, his voice told them about calm and quiet and eternal rest. No landlord, no cotton to chop, no ticket at the company store growing like a cancer. Just time itself frozen like leaves in winter ice and nothing in the round world to worry about or dread.

the logical strategy in one-round Prisoner’s Dilemma is to defect. Cooperation flourishes when games have an uncertain number of rounds, and with the capacity for our reputations to precede us. Groups, by definition, have multiple-round games and the means to spread news of someone being a jerk.

They are also difficult to reconcile with archaeological evidence of how cities actually began in many parts of the world: as civic experiments on a grand scale, which frequently lacked the expected features of administrative hierarchy and authoritarian rule. We do not possess an adequate terminology for these early cities. To call them ‘egalitarian’, as we’ve seen, could mean quite a number of different things. It might imply an urban parliament and co-ordinated projects of social housing, as with some pre-Columbian centres in the Americas; or the self-organizing of autonomous households into neighbourhoods and citizens’ assemblies, as with prehistoric mega-sites north of the Black Sea; or, perhaps, the introduction of some explicit notion of equality based on principles of uniformity and sameness, as in Uruk-period Mesopotamia. None of this variability is surprising once we recall what preceded cities in each region. That was not, in fact, rudimentary or isolated groups, but far-flung networks of societies, spanning diverse ecologies, with people, plants, animals, drugs, objects of value, songs and ideas moving between them in endlessly intricate ways. While the individual units were demographically small, especially at certain times of year, they were typically organized into loose coalitions or confederacies. At the very least, these were simply the logical outcome of our first freedom: to move away from one’s home, knowing one will be received and cared for, even valued, in some distant place. At most they were examples of ‘amphictyony’, in which some kind of formal organization was put in charge of the care and maintenance of sacred places. It seems that Marcel Mauss had a point when he argued that we should reserve the term ‘civilization’ for great hospitality zones such as these. Of course, we are used to thinking of ‘civilization’ as something that originates in cities – but, armed with new knowledge, it seems more realistic to put things the other way round and to imagine the first cities as one of those great regional confederacies, compressed into a small space.

The worst terrorist attack in history by far was 9/11, and it claimed 3,000 lives; in most bad years, the United States suffers a few dozen terrorist deaths, a rounding error in the tally of homicides and accidents. (The annual toll is lower, for example, than the number of people killed by lightning, bee stings, or drowning in bathtubs.) Yet 9/11 led to the creation of a new federal department, massive surveillance of citizens and hardening of public facilities, and two wars which killed more than twice as many Americans as the number who died in 2001, together with hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Afghans.

from her purse. “We have to follow that car!” “But not too close,” Nancy replied. “We’d make them suspicious.” The girls waited three minutes before backing out into the main highway and then turning into the adjacent road. Though the automobile ahead had disappeared, tire prints were plainly visible. The road twisted through a stretch of wood-land. When finally the tire prints turned off into a heavily wooded narrow lane, Nancy was sure they were not far from the cabin. She parked among some trees and they went forward on foot. “There it is!” whispered Nancy, recognizing the chimney. “Bess, I want you to take my car, drive to River Heights, and look up the name of the owner of the car we just saw. Here’s the license number. “After you’ve been to the Motor Vehicle Bureau, please phone Mrs. Putney’s house. If she answers, we’ll know it wasn’t she we saw in the car. Then get hold of Dad or Ned, and bring one of them here as fast as you can. We may need help. Got it straight?” “I—I—g-guess so,” Bess answered. “Hurry back! No telling what may happen while you’re away.” The two watched as Nancy’s car rounded a bend and was lost to view. Then Nancy and George walked swiftly through the woods toward the cabin. Approaching the building, Nancy and George were amazed to find that no car was parked on the road in front. “How do you figure it?” George whispered as the girls crouched behind bushes. “We certainly saw tire marks leading into this road!” “Yes, but the car that passed may have gone on without stopping. Possibly the driver saw us and changed her plans. Wait here, and watch the cabin while I check the tire marks out at the

Traces of historical associations can long outlast actual contact. In the dense, subtropical forests from India across to the South China Sea, venomous snakes are common, and there is always an advantage in pretending to be something dangerous. The slow loris, a weird, nocturnal primate, has a number of unusual features that, taken together, seem to be mimicking spectacled cobras. They move in a sinuous, serpentine way through the branches, always smooth and slow. When threatened, they raise their arms up behind their head, shiver and hiss, their wide, round eyes closely resembling the markings on the inside of the spectacled cobra’s hood. Even more remarkably, when in this position, the loris has access to glands in its armpit which, when combined with saliva, can produce a venom capable of causing anaphylactic shock in humans. In behaviour, colour and even bite, the primate has come to resemble the snake, a sheep in wolf’s clothing. Today, the ranges of the loris and cobras do not overlap, but climate reconstructions reaching back tens of thousands of years suggest that once they would have been similar. It is possible that the loris is an outdated imitation artist, stuck in an evolutionary rut, compelled by instinct to act out an impression of something neither it nor its audience has ever seen.

Oh! very well," exclaimed Miss Bates, "then I need not be uneasy. 'Three things very dull indeed.' That will just do for me, you know. I shall be sure to say three dull things as soon as ever I open my mouth, shan't I?—(looking round with the most good-humoured dependence on every body's assent)—Do not you all think I shall?" Emma could not resist. "Ah! ma'am, but there may be a difficulty. Pardon me—but you will be limited as to number—only three at once." Miss Bates, deceived by the mock ceremony of her manner, did not immediately catch her meaning; but, when it burst on her, it could not anger, though a slight blush shewed that it could pain her.

Look, Bob, what part of this don't you understand, eh? It's a matter of style, okay? A proper brawl doesn't just happen. You don't just pile in, not anymore. Now, Oyster Dave here--put your helmet back on, Dave--will be the enemy in front, and Basalt, who, as we know, don't need a helmet, he'll be the enemy coming up behind you. Okay, it's well past knuckles time, let's say Gravy there has done his thing with the Bench Swipe, there's a bit of knife play, we've done the whole Chandelier Swing number, blah blah blah, then Second Chair--that's you, Bob--you step smartly between their Number Five man and a Bottler, swing the chair back over your head, like this--sorry, Pointy--and then swing it right back onto Number Five, bang, crash, and there's a cushy six points in your pocket. If they're playing a dwarf at Number Five, then a chair won't even slow him down, but don't fret, hang on to the bits that stay in your hand, pause one moment as he comes at you, and then belt him across both ears. They hate that, as Stronginthearm here will tell you. Another three points. It's probably going to be freestyle after that but I want all of you, including Mucky Mick and Crispo, to try for a Double Andrew when it gets down to the fist-fighting again. Remember? You back into each other, turn around to give the other guy a thumping, cue moment of humorous recognition, then link arms, swing round and see to the other fellow's attacker, foot or fist, it's your choice. Fifteen points right there if you get it to flow just right. Oh, and remember we'll have an Igor standing by, so if your arm gets taken off do pick it up and hit the other bugger with it, it gets a laugh and twenty points. On that subject, do remember what I said about getting everything tattooed with your name, all right? Igors do their best, but you'll be on your feet much quicker if you make life easier for him and, what's more, it's your feet you'll be on. Okay, positions, everyone, let's run through it again...

The oyakodan is delicious. It's perfectly representative of the subtler side of Japanese food, not the guts side. I dipped my spoon through the omelet and pulled up a scrag of egg, a cube of chicken, and a clump of rice. It was one of those predestined combinations, like shrimp and grits, rounded out perfectly by the hint of soy sauce.

After wolf number 10, the father of the first group of pups born in the park, was killed by a local hunter after wandering south of park boundaries, program officials rounded up the mother and the helpless pups, put them back into the acclimation pen, and provided them with food for several months. Even when the pups got a bit older, program managers feared that the mother would have a hard time taking care of them by herself when they were released. Then, on the day they were to be released, in an event that no biologist has yet been able to explain, a bachelor wolf living miles away in another part of the park showed up outside the pen, just in time to form a new family unit.

A desert planet on he Outer Rim, Tatooine is dusty, gritty, and grim. Everything's parched and thirsty and dry, From the searing earth to th eglaring sky. Why? you might ask. Oh, how can this be? Just look up to the sky, And you will soon see. It's those two blasted suns, All round and white-hot. They're to blame for this heat... But, oh, what a shot!

Having never had dealings with Bow Street, Lady Fieldhurst was not quite certain what to expect: perhaps a stout fellow past his prime, befuddled with sleep or spirits, with a bulbous red nose—the same sort as might be found in any number of watchmen’s boxes across the metropolis. The individual who entered the room in [the footman's] wake, however, was very nearly her own age. To be sure, his nose was somewhat crooked, as if it had been broken at some point, but it was far from bulbous, and it was certainly not red. He was quite tall, almost gangly, with curling brown hair tied at the nape of his neck in an outmoded queue. He wore an unfashionably shallow-crowned hat and a black swallow-tailed coat of good cloth but indifferent cut; indeed, his only claim to fashion lay in the quizzing glass which hung round his neck from a black ribbon, and which he now raised, the resulting magnification revealing his eyes to be a warm brown. Julia might have been much reassured as to his competence, had it not been for the fact that his mouth hung open as from a rusty hinge.

The country remained the same, and was extremely uninteresting. The complete similarity of the productions throughout Patagonia is one of its most striking characters. The level plains of arid shingle support the same stunted and dwarf plants; and in the valleys the same thorn-bearing bushes grow. Everywhere we see the same birds and insects. Even the very banks of the river and of the clear streamlets which entered it, were scarcely enlivened by a brighter tint of green. The curse of sterility is on the land, and the water flowing over a bed of pebbles partakes of the same curse. Hence the number of waterfowl is very scanty; for there is nothing to support life in the stream of this barren river. (In regards to the steppes of Patagonia)

NIGHT OF LOVE The moon has left the sky, love, The stars are hiding now, And frowning on the world, love, Night bares her sable brow. The snow is on the ground, love, And cold and keen the air is. I 'm singing here to you, love; You 're dreaming there in Paris. But this is Nature's law, love, Though just it may not seem, That men should wake to sing, love, While maidens sleep and dream. Them care may not molest, love, Nor stir them from their slumbers, Though midnight find the swain, love, Still halting o'er his numbers. I watch the rosy dawn, love, Come stealing up the east, While all things round rejoice, love, That Night her reign has ceased. The lark will soon be heard, love, And on his way be winging; When Nature's poets wake, love, Why should a man be singing?

Cultures of memory are organized by round numbers, intervals of ten; but somehow the remembrance of the dead is easier when the numbers are not round, when the final digit is not a zero. So within the Holocaust, it is perhaps easier to think of 780,863 different people at Treblinka: where the three at the end might be Tamara and Itta Willenberg, whose clothes clung together after they were gassed,

Perhaps talk of counters turned the boy’s thoughts to his father’s glove shop. His father would have accounted for all his transactions using the tokens. They were hard and round and very thin, made of copper or brass. There were counters for one pair of gloves, and for two pairs, and three and four and five. But there was no counter for zero. No counters existed for all the sales that his father did not close.

They lived and died too quickly in those years that surrounded the making of the reservation, died before they could be recorded and in such painful numbers that it was hard to remember them all without uttering, as my father did sometimes as he read local history, and the white man appeared and drove them down into the earth, which sounded like an Old Testament prophecy but was just an observation of the truth.

It's been over a year since they've visited their son's market. As they walk through the parking lot they take in a number of improvements. Brian admires the raised garden beds made of cedar planks that flank the sides of the lot. There are stalks of tomatoes, staked beans, baskets of green herbs- oregano, lavender, fragrant blades of lemongrass and pointed curry leaf. The planter of baby lettuces has a chalkboard hung from its side: "Just add fork." A wheelbarrow parked by the door is heaped with bright coronas of sunflowers, white daisies, jagged red ginger and birds-of-paradise. Avis feels a leap of pride as they enter the market: the floor of polished bamboo, the sky-blue ceiling, the wooden shelves- like bookshelves in a library. And the smells. Warm, round billows of baking bread, roasting garlic and onions and chicken.

In mid-January 2024, with Gaza’s health system essentially collapsed and no one left to count the dead, The New York Times publishes an article detailing a drop in the number of Palestinian casualties—marking a change in Israel’s approach, it is said. This will happen again and again in the coming months: very serious reporting about perceived slowdowns in the rate of killing, the “war” entering a different “phase.” Every such story seems to prompt another round of argument about the folly of abandoning the Democratic Party now, when so much is at stake. A writer friend of mine describes it as cutting off your nose to spite your face. It’s a hackneyed phrase for a writer to rely on, but I can’t stop thinking about it, the privilege implicit in its assumptions: ownership of body, agency over mutilation. It is a source of great confusion first, then growing rage, among establishment Democrats that there might exist a sizable group of people in this country who quite simply cannot condone a real, ongoing genocide, no matter how much worse an alternative ruling party may be or do. This stance boggles a particular kind of liberal mind because such a conception of political affairs, applied with any regularity, forces the establishment to stand for something.

Margrie himself was made the first ‘Mr London’, a title which has the pleasing sense of them having had a swimsuit round in the competition. Margrie believed that he was a perfect example of a new evolutionary stage in human development, which he called Peckham Man. It never ceases to amaze me how many women struggle with self-belief while the vast majority of men have no trouble with it at all. He must have been insufferable.

The founding of a science more or less on the notion of repetition brings in its train yet another delusion of a quantitative kind, the delusion that consists in thinking that the accumulation of a large number of facts can be of use by itself as ‘proof' of a theory; nevertheless, even a little reflection will make it evident that facts of the same kind are always indefinite in multitude, so that they can never all be taken into account, quite apart from the consideration that the same facts usually fit several different theories equally well. It will be said that the establishment of a greater number of facts does at least give more ‘probability' to a theory; but to say so is to admit that no certitude can be arrived at in that way, and that therefore the conclusions promulgated have nothing ‘exact' about them; it is also an admission of the wholly ‘empirical' character of modern science, although, by a strange irony, its partisans are pleased to accuse of ‘empiricism' the knowledge of the ancients, whereas exactly the opposite is the truth: for this ancient knowledge, of the true nature of which they have no idea whatever, started from principles and not from experimental observations, so that it can truly be said that profane science is built up exactly the opposite way round to traditional science.

According to Home Intelligence, “People living near guns are suffering from serious lack of sleep: a number of interviews made round one gun in West London showed that people were getting much less sleep than others a few hundred yards away.” But no one wanted the guns to stop. “There is little complaint about lack of sleep, mainly because of the new exhilaration created by the barrage. Nevertheless this serious loss of sleep needs watching.

Rigid ranking based on minuscule differences misleads rather than informs. Rounding and approximation is superior to unwarranted and unnecessary precision. Doubt, caution, and incessant questioning are in order—but so is the insistence on quantifying the complex realities of the modern world. If we are to understand many unruly realities, if we are to base our decisions on the best available information, then there is no substitute for this pursuit.

At that moment their conversation was interrupted by a most barbaric sound – a great horn was being blown. A number of men rushed forward and heaved the great town gates shut. Thinking that perhaps some danger threatened the town, Stephen looked round in alarm. “Sir, what is happening?” “Oh, it is these people’s custom to shut the gate every night against the wicked heathen,” said the gentleman, languidly, “by which they mean everyone except themselves. But

We don't all make it out the other side, not all of us. But somewhere, there's the click of a pen, a proud signature, a father's hand on a young man's shoulder, and we reload. That's the sound of our collective gun cocking, the click of a pen. That's us racking another round in the chamber. Fire that boy out, hope you hit something. If he gets three before he goes home in his own bag, then the numbers look good. That father gets his medal. No one else to wear it.

I have been to the Alpine countries of Austria and Ardamia before, but never to this corner of the range, and while the journey to St. Liesl, which perches high above sea level, was not a comfortable one, it took my breath away. The path wound up a mountainside still dotted with the last of the summer flowers, snowbells and cheery buttercups. Mountains cluttered every horizon, many crowned in an eternal snow. Below us was the town of Leoburg with its railroad, its neat stone-and-timber buildings, its sharp and commanding steeple, but the higher we went, the more all this was dwarfed by the wildness surrounding it, the railroad a thin line of stitches connecting us to the world we knew. And then we rounded a bend in the path, and we could no longer see the town at all. I understand now why the folklore of the Alps is so rich--- the many folds and crevices in the mountainsides could hide any number of faerie doors opening onto dozens of stories.

And, even now, as he paced the streets, and listlessly looked round on the gradually increasing bustle and preparation for the day, everything appeared to yield him some new occasion for despondency. Last night, the sacrifice of a young, affectionate, and beautiful creature, to such a wretch, and in such a cause, had seemed a thing too monstrous to succeed; and the warmer he grew, the more confident he felt that some interposition must save her from his clutches. But now, when he thought how regularly things went on, from day to day, in the same unvarying round; how youth and beauty died, and ugly griping age lived tottering on; how crafty avarice grew rich, and manly honest hearts were poor and sad; how few they were who tenanted the stately houses, and how many of those who lay in noisome pens, or rose each day and laid them down each night, and lived and died, father and son, mother and child, race upon race, and generation upon generation, without a home to shelter them or the energies of one single man directed to their aid; how, in seeking, not a luxurious and splendid life, but the bare means of a most wretched and inadequate subsistence, there were women and children in that one town, divided into classes, numbered and estimated as regularly as the noble families and folks of great degree, and reared from infancy to drive most criminal and dreadful trades; how ignorance was punished and never taught; how jail-doors gaped, and gallows loomed, for thousands urged towards them by circumstances darkly curtaining their very cradles' heads, and but for which they might have earned their honest bread and lived in peace; how many died in soul, and had no chance of life; how many who could scarcely go astray, be they vicious as they would, turned haughtily from the crushed and stricken wretch who could scarce do otherwise, and who would have been a greater wonder had he or she done well, than even they had they done ill; how much injustice, misery, and wrong, there was, and yet how the world rolled on, from year to year, alike careless and indifferent, and no man seeking to remedy or redress it; when he thought of all this, and selected from the mass the one slight case on which his thoughts were bent, he felt, indeed, that there was little ground for hope, and little reason why it should not form an atom in the huge aggregate of distress and sorrow, and add one small and unimportant unit to swell the great amount.

[The] structural theory is of extreme simplicity. It assumes that the molecule is held together by links between one atom and the next: that every kind of atom can form a definite small number of such links: that these can be single, double or triple: that the groups may take up any position possible by rotation round the line of a single but not round that of a double link: finally that with all the elements of the first short period [of the periodic table], and with many others as well, the angles between the valencies are approximately those formed by joining the centre of a regular tetrahedron to its angular points. No assumption whatever is made as to the mechanism of the linkage. Through the whole development of organic chemistry this theory has always proved capable of providing a different structure for every different compound that can be isolated. Among the hundreds of thousands of known substances, there are never more isomeric forms than the theory permits.

I want to sit around a Gypsy campfire, eating freshly caught rabbit in the company of bare knuckle fighters, and listen to stories about their fights. I want to sit with King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table after they’ve defeated the barbarians in battle. I want to be there when Arthur pulls Excalibur from the stone, and I want to be surrounded by dragons, wizards and sorcerers. I want to meet the Muslim leader, Saladin, who occupied Jerusalem in 1187, and despite the fact that a number of holy Muslim places had been violated by Christians, preferred to take Jerusalem without bloodshed. He prohibited acts of vengeance, and his army was so disciplined that there were no deaths or violence after the city surrendered. I want to sit around the desert campfire with him. I want to drink with Caribbean buccaneers of the 17th century and listen to their tales of preying on shipping and Spanish settlements. I want to witness Celtic Berserkers fighting in ritual warfare in a trance-like fury. I want to spend time working on a scrap cruise, the very last cruise before the ship’s due to be scrapped, so there’s no future in it, and it attracts all the mad faces of the Merchant Navy. Faces that are known in that industry, who couldn’t survive outside ‘the life’ and who for the most part are quite dangerous and mad themselves. I’d rather have one friend who’ll fight like hell over ten who’ll do nothing but talk shit. And I want to ride with highwaymen on ribbons of moonlight over the purple moor.

This is more noble, my son, to honor equality, which ever links friends with friends, and states with states, and allies with allies: for equality is sanctioned by law among men. But the lesser share is ever at enmity with the greater, and straight begins the day of hatred. For equality arranged also among mortals measures, and the divisions of weights, and defined numbers. And the dark eye of night, and the light of the sun, equally walk their annual round, and neither of them being overcome hath envy of the other. Thus the sun and the night are subservient to men, but wilt not thou brook having an equal share of government, and give his share to him? Then where is justice? Why dost thou honor so unboundedly that prosperous injustice, royalty, and think so highly of her? Is the being conspicuous honorable? At least, it is empty honor. Or dost thou desire to labor much, possessing much in thy house? but what is superfluity? It possesses but a name; since a sufficiency indeed to the temperate is abundance

It was astonishing how loudly one laughed at tales of gruesome things, of war’s brutality-I with the rest of them. I think at the bottom of it was a sense of the ironical contrast between the normal ways of civilian life and this hark-back to the caveman code. It made all our old philosophy of life monstrously ridiculous. It played the “hat trick” with the gentility of modern manners. Men who had been brought up to Christian virtues, who had prattled their little prayers at mothers’ knees, who had grown up to a love of poetry, painting, music, the gentle arts, over-sensitized to the subtleties of half-tones, delicate scales of emotion, fastidious in their choice of words, in their sense of beauty, found themselves compelled to live and act like ape-men; and it was abominably funny. They laughed at the most frightful episodes, which revealed this contrast between civilized ethics and the old beast law. The more revolting it was the more, sometimes, they shouted with laughter, especially in reminiscence, when the tale was told in the gilded salon of a French chateau, or at a mess-table. It was, I think, the laughter of mortals at the trick which had been played on them by an ironical fate. They had been taught to believe that the whole object of life was to reach out to beauty and love, and that mankind, in its progress to perfection, had killed the beast instinct, cruelty, blood-lust, the primitive, savage law of survival by tooth and claw and club and ax. All poetry, all art, all religion had preached this gospel and this promise. Now that ideal had broken like a china vase dashed to hard ground. The contrast between That and This was devastating. It was, in an enormous world-shaking way, like a highly dignified man in a silk hat, morning coat, creased trousers, spats, and patent boots suddenly slipping on a piece of orange-peel and sitting, all of a heap, with silk hat flying, in a filthy gutter. The war-time humor of the soul roared with mirth at the sight of all that dignity and elegance despoiled. So we laughed merrily, I remember, when a military chaplain (Eton, Christ Church, and Christian service) described how an English sergeant stood round the traverse of a German trench, in a night raid, and as the Germans came his way, thinking to escape, he cleft one skull after another with a steel-studded bludgeon a weapon which he had made with loving craftsmanship on the model of Blunderbore’s club in the pictures of a fairy-tale. So we laughed at the adventures of a young barrister (a brilliant fellow in the Oxford “Union”) whose pleasure it was to creep out o’ nights into No Man’s Land and lie doggo in a shell-hole close to the enemy’s barbed wire, until presently, after an hour’s waiting or two, a German soldier would crawl out to fetch in a corpse. The English barrister lay with his rifle ready. Where there had been one corpse there were two. Each night he made a notch on his rifle three notches one night to check the number of his victims. Then he came back to breakfast in his dugout with a hearty appetite.

More familiar is the argument from design, an approach that penetrates deeply into issues of fundamental scientific concern. This argument was admirably summarized by David Hume: “Look round the world: contemplate the whole and every part of it; you will find it to be nothing but one great machine, subdivided into an infinite number of lesser machines.… All these various machines, even their most minute parts, are adjusted to each other with an accuracy which ravishes into admiration all men who have ever contemplated them. The curious adapting of means to ends, throughout all nature, resembles exactly, though it much exceeds, the production of human contrivance; of human design, thought, wisdom, and intelligence. Since therefore the effects resemble each other, we are led to infer, by all the rules of analogy, that the causes also resemble; and that the Author of Nature is somewhat similar to the mind of man; though possessed of much larger faculties proportioned to the grandure of the work which he has executed.

MNEMONIC I was tired. So I lay down. My lids grew heavy. So I slept. Slender memory, stay with me. I was cold once. So my father took off his blue sweater. He wrapped me in it, and I never gave it back. It is the sweater he wore to America, this one, which I’ve grown into, whose sleeves are too long, whose elbows have thinned, who outlives its rightful owner. Flamboyant blue in daylight, poor blue by daylight, it is black in the folds. A serious man who devised complex systems of numbers and rhymes to aid him in remembering, a man who forgot nothing, my father would be ashamed of me. Not because I’m forgetful, but because there is no order to my memory, a heap of details, uncatalogued, illogical. For instance: God was lonely. So he made me. My father loved me. So he spanked me. It hurt him to do so. He did it daily. The earth is flat. Those who fall off don’t return. The earth is round. All things reveal themselves to men only gradually. I won’t last. Memory is sweet. Even when it’s painful, memory is sweet. Once, I was cold. So my father took off his blue sweater.

Many people are bothered about the number of privately owned guns in the United States, but what about publicly owned ones? In recent years the United States government (not the military) has purchased 1.6 billion rounds of ammunition, enough to shoot the entire population five times over. The Social Security Administration ordered 174,000 rounds of hollow-point bullets. The Internal Revenue Service, the Department of Education, the Bureau of Land Management, even the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, all have guns.

February 21 Have You Ever Been Carried Away for Him? She hath wrought a good work on Me. Mark 14:6 If human love does not carry a man beyond himself, it is not love. If love is always discreet, always wise, always sensible and calculating, never carried beyond itself, it is not love at all. It may be affection, it may be warmth of feeling, but it has not the true nature of love in it. Have I ever been carried away to do something for God not because it was my duty, nor because it was useful, nor because there was anything in it at all beyond the fact that I love Him? Have I ever realised that I can bring to God things which are of value to Him, or am I mooning round the magnitude of His Redemption whilst there are any number of things I might be doing? Not Divine, colossal things which could be recorded as marvellous, but ordinary, simple human things which will give evidence to God that I am abandoned to Him? Have I ever produced in the heart of the Lord Jesus what Mary of Bethany produced? There are times when it seems as if God watches to see if we will give Him the abandoned tokens of how genuinely we do love Him. Abandon to God is of more value than personal holiness. Personal holiness focuses the eye on our own whiteness; we are greatly concerned about the way we walk and talk and look, fearful lest we offend Him. Perfect love casts out all that when once we are abandoned to God. We have to get rid of this notion—“Am I of any use?” and make up our minds that we are not, and we may be near the truth. It is never a question of being of use, but of being of value to God Himself. When we are abandoned to God, He works through us all the time.

When I first began to criticize small farming, a number of critics (most of them small-scale farmers) roundly condemned me for supporting agribusiness. In my favorite example to date, Joel Salatin, who figures prominently in the grass-fed-beef chapter, condemned my “love affair with confinement hog factories”! This reaction, while wildly inaccurate, is nonetheless important to take seriously. Most notably, it’s almost comically indicative of how narrowly we have framed our options. Joel was serious. His accusation shows that by constricting our choices to animal products sourced from either industrial or nonindustrial operations, by holding up the animal-based alternatives to industrial agriculture as our only alternative, we have silenced discussion of the most fertile, most politically consequential, and most reform-minded choice: eating plants. This alternative to the alternatives changes the entire game of revolutionizing our broken food system. It places the food movement on a new foundation, infuses it with fresh energy, and promotes the only choice that keeps agribusiness executives awake at night.

But why did she come back and take her card away?" asked Miss Mackintosh. "I told Florence that Miss Mapp had heard something dreadful about her. And how did she know that Lady Deal was coming here at all? The house was taken in my name." "That's just what we all long to find out," said Diva eagerly. "She said that somebody in London told her." "But who?" asked Miss Mackintosh. "Florence only settled to come at lunch time that day, and she told her butler to ring up Susie and say she would be arriving." Diva's eyes grew round and bright with inductive reasoning. "I believe we're on the right tack," she said. "Could she have received Lady Deal's butler's message, do you think? What's your number?" "Tilling 76," said Miss Mackintosh. Evie gave three ecstatic little squeaks. "Oh, that's it, that's it!" she said. "Elizabeth Mapp is Tilling 67. So careless of them, but all quite plain. And she did hear it from somebody in London. Quite true, and so dreadfully false and misleading, and so like her. Isn't it, Diva? Well, it does serve her right to be found out." Miss Mackintosh was evidently a true Tillingite. "How marvellous!" she said.

Statistically, maybe. And linguistically. With a little sociology thrown in. Plus a deep and innate understanding of human nature. Think about the number two hundred. Sounds like a nice round figure, but it isn’t, really. No one says two hundred purely at random. People say a hundred, or a thousand. Or hundreds or thousands. Two hundred deaths sounds specific to me. Like a true number. Maybe rounded up from the high 180s or 190s, but it sounds to me like there’s information behind it. Enough to keep me interested, anyway. For instance. Speaking as an investigator.” Westwood said nothing.

And while [we] do have possibilities that are vast and magnificent and almost infinite in scope, it's important to remember that our choice-rich lives have the potential to breed their own brand of trouble. We are susceptible to emotional uncertainties and neuroses that are probably not very common among the Hmong, but that run rampant these days among my contemporaries in, say, Baltimore. The problem, simply put, is that we cannot choose everything simultaneously. So we live in danger of becoming paralyzed by indecision, terrified that every choice might be the wrong choice...Equally disquieting are the times when we do make a choice, only to later feel as though we have murdered some other aspect of our being by settling on one single concrete decision. By choosing Door Number Three, we fear we have killed off a different -- but equally critical piece of our soul that could only have been made manifest by walking through Door Number One or Door Number Two. ...Two of anything brings the automatic possibility of uncertainty to our lives. Now imagine a life in which every day a person is presented with not two or even three but dozens of choices, and you can begin to grasp why the modern world has become, even with all its advantages, a neurosis-generating machine of the highest order. In a world of such abundant possibility, many of us simply go limp from indecision. Or we derail our life's journey again and again, backing up to try the doors we neglected on the first round, desperate to get it right this time. Or we become compulsive comparers - always measuring our lives against some other person's life, secretly wondering if we should have taken her path instead. Compulsive comparing, of course, only leads to debilitating causes of "life envy": the certainty that somebody else is much luckier than you, and that if only you had her body, her husband, her children, her job, everything would be easy and wonderful and happy. All these choices and all this longing can create a weird kind of haunting in our lives - as though the ghosts of all our other, unchosen, possibilities linger forever in a shadow world around us, continuously asking, "Are you certain this is what you really wanted?" And nowhere does that question risk haunting us more than in our marriages, precisely because the emotional stakes of that most intensely personal choice have become so huge.

Those who, from the start, are the unfortunate, the downtrodden, the broken – these are the ones, the weakest, who most undermine life amongst men, who introduce the deadliest poison and scepticism into our trust in life, in man, in ourselves. Where can we escape the surreptitious glance imparting a deep sadness, the backward glance of the born misfit revealing how such a man communes with himself, – that glance which is a sigh. ‘If only I were some other person!’ is what this glance sighs: ‘but there’s no hope of that. I am who I am: how could I get away from myself ? And oh – I’m fed up with myself!’ . . . In such a soil of self-contempt, such a veritable swamp, every kind of weed and poisonous plant grows, all of them so small, hidden, dissembling and sugary. Here, the worms of revenge and rancour teem all round; here, the air stinks of things unrevealed and unconfessed; here, the web of the most wicked conspiracy is continually being spun, – the conspiracy of those who suffer against those who are successful and victorious, here, the sight of the victorious man is hated. And what mendacity to avoid admitting this hatred as hatred! What expenditure of big words and gestures, what an art of ‘righteous’ slander! These failures: what noble eloquence flows from their lips! How much sugared, slimy, humble humility swims in their eyes! What do they really want? At any rate, to represent justice, love, wisdom, superiority, that is the ambition of these who are ‘the lowest’, these sick people! And how skilful such an ambition makes them! In particular, we have to admire the counterfeiter’s skill with which the stamp of virtue, the ding-a-ling golden ring of virtue is now imitated. They have taken out a lease on virtue to keep it just for themselves, these weak and incurably sick people, there is no doubt about it: ‘Only we are good and just’ is what they say, ‘only we are the homines bonæ voluntatis’. They promenade in our midst like living reproaches, like warnings to us, – as though health, success, strength, pride and the feeling of power were in themselves depravities for which penance, bitter penance will one day be exacted: oh, how ready they themselves are, in the last resort, to make others penitent, how they thirst to be hangmen! Amongst them we find plenty of vengeance-seekers disguised as judges, with the word justice continually in their mouth like poisonous spittle, pursing their lips and always at the ready to spit at anybody who does not look discontented and who cheerfully goes his own way. Among their number there is no lack of that most disgusting type of dandy, the lying freaks who want to impersonate ‘beautiful souls’ and put their wrecked sensuality on the market, swaddled in verses and other nappies, as ‘purity of the heart’: the type of moral onanists and ‘self-gratifiers.’ The will of the sick to appear superior in any way, their instinct for secret paths, which lead to tyranny over the healthy, – where can it not be found, this will to power of precisely the weakest!

Graphic designer, Ava Dennis, gave a dead-eyed stare to her computer screen and contemplated chucking it out the window of her second-floor apartment. Twenty-seven was the number of rounds of edits she’d done for a personalized Valentine’s Day card. Four was the number of times her client, Kathy, had typed the phrase we want this card to resemble our love in emails to Ava. Zero was the number of Valentine’s Day dates Ava had been on, which was probably the reason for her questionable attitude around this time of year. You see, Ava Dennis was a victim of the Valentine’s Day Curse. Three times, she’d had a serious boyfriend

Diablo had rounded up this band of standout demons for his plan—and Rimuru, oblivious to all this, just casually gave them names after a moment’s thought, an incredibly reckless move. As a result, every demon reborn here had obtained power beyond the natural ways of the world. They were now an unimaginable force, a great assemblage of demons feared by all. Despite numbering less than a thousand, they were an army all by themselves. They would later come to be known as the Black Corps, Tempest’s most powerful military and a horrifying symbol of fear. And the Black Corps was born the moment they were unleashed from their capsules.

In Memory of My Feelings" My quietness has a man in it, he is transparent and he carries me quietly, like a gondola, through the streets. He has several likenesses, like stars and years, like numerals. My quietness has a number of naked selves, so many pistols I have borrowed to protect myselves from creatures who too readily recognize my weapons and have murder in their heart! though in winter they are warm as roses, in the desert taste of chilled anisette. At times, withdrawn, I rise into the cool skies and gaze on at the imponderable world with the simple identification of my colleagues, the mountains. Manfred climbs to my nape, speaks, but I do not hear him, I'm too blue. An elephant takes up his trumpet, money flutters from the windows of cries, silk stretching its mirror across shoulder blades. A gun is "fired." One of me rushes to window #13 and one of me raises his whip and one of me flutters up from the center of the track amidst the pink flamingoes, and underneath their hooves as they round the last turn my lips are scarred and brown, brushed by tails, masked in dirt's lust, definition, open mouths gasping for the cries of the bettors for the lungs of earth. So many of my transparencies could not resist the race! Terror in earth, dried mushrooms, pink feathers, tickets, a flaking moon drifting across the muddied teeth, the imperceptible moan of covered breathing, love of the serpent! I am underneath its leaves as the hunter crackles and pants and bursts, as the barrage balloon drifts behind a cloud and animal death whips out its flashlight, whistling and slipping the glove off the trigger hand. The serpent's eyes redden at sight of those thorny fingernails, he is so smooth! My transparent selves flail about like vipers in a pail, writhing and hissing without panic, with a certain justice of response and presently the aquiline serpent comes to resemble the Medusa.

Hey! Raster!” Raster is so glad to be wanted that he does figure eights around the screen. “Calculator!” I shout. “No need, boss! Simply tell me your desired calculation, and I will do it in my head!” So I have a most tedious conversation with Raster, in which I estimate the number of cubic feet in Soldier Field, rounded to the nearest foot. I ask Raster to multiply that by 24,808 and he shoots back: 537,824,167,717. A nongeek wouldn’t have thought twice. But I say, “Raster, you have Spam for brains. It should be an exact multiple of eight!” Evidently my brother’s new box came with one of those defective chips that makes errors when the numbers get really big.

Preschoolers make a number of assumptions about words and their meaning as they acquire language, one of the most important of which is what the psychologist Ellen Markman calls the principle of mutual exclusivity. Simply put, this means that small children have difficulty believing that any one object can have two different names. The natural assumption of children, Markman argues, is that if an object or person is given a second label, then that label must refer to some secondary property or attribute of that object. You can see how useful this assumption is to a child faced with the extraordinary task of assigning a word to everything in the world. A child who learns the word elephant knows, with absolute certainty, that it is something different from a dog. Each new word makes the child's knowledge of the world more precise. Without mutual exclusivity, by contrast, if a child thought that elephant could simply be another label for dog, then each new word would make the world seem more complicated. Mutual exclusivity also helps the child think clearly. "Suppose," Markman writes, "a child who already knows 'apple' and 'red' hears someone refer to an apple as 'round.' By mutual exclusivity, the child can eliminate the object (apple) and its color (red) as the meaning of 'round' and can try to analyze the object for some other property to label.

For years, the suspicion that Mr. Putin has a secret fortune has intrigued scholars, industry analysts, opposition figures, journalists and intelligence agencies but defied their efforts to uncover it. Numbers are thrown around suggesting that Mr. Putin may control $40 billion or even $70 billion, in theory making him the richest head of state in world history. For all the rumors and speculation, though, there has been little if any hard evidence, and Gunvor has adamantly denied any financial ties to Mr. Putin and repeated that denial on Friday. But Mr. Obama’s response to the Ukraine crisis, while derided by critics as slow and weak, has reinvigorated a 15-year global hunt for Mr. Putin’s hidden wealth. Now, as the Obama administration prepares to announce another round of sanctions as early as Monday targeting Russians it considers part of Mr. Putin’s financial circle, it is sending a not-very-subtle message that it thinks it knows where the Russian leader has his money, and that he could ultimately be targeted directly or indirectly. “It’s something that could be done that would send a very clear signal of taking the gloves off and not just dance around it,” said Juan C. Zarate, a White House counterterrorism adviser to President George W. Bush who helped pioneer the government’s modern financial campaign techniques to choke off terrorist money.

In Sevilla there was a madman who had the strangest, most comical notion that any madman ever had. What he did was to make a tube out of a reed that he sharpened at one end, and then he would catch a dog on the street, or somewhere else, hold down one of its hind legs with his foot, lift the other with his hand, fit the tube into the right place, and blow until he had made the animal as round as a ball, and then, holding it up, he would give the dog two little pats on the belly and let it go, saying to the onlookers, and there were always a good number of them: “Now do your graces think it’s an easy job to blow up a dog?” Now does your grace think it’s an easy job to write a book?

When an official report in the UK was commissioned to examine the mathematics needed in the workplace, the investigator found that estimation was the most useful mathematical activity. Yet when children who have experienced traditional math classes are asked to estimate, they are often completely flummoxed and try to work out exact answers, then round them off to look like an estimate. This is because they have not developed a good feel for numbers, which would allow them to estimate instead of calculate, and also because they have learned, wrongly, that mathematics is all about precision, not about making estimates or guesses. Yet both are at the heart of mathematical problem solving.

I suppose that many think we live in a cheap and sensational age, all sky-signs and headlines; an age of advertisement and standardization. And yet, this is a more enlightened age than any human beings have lived in hitherto. For instance, practically all of us can read. Some of you may say: ‘Ah! But what? Detective stories, scandals, and the sporting news.’ No doubt, compared with Sunday newspapers and mystery stories, the Oedipus, Hamlet and Faust are very small beer. All the same, the number of volumes issued each year continually gains on the number of the population in all Western countries. Every phase and question of life is brought more and more into the limelight. Theatres, cinemas, the radio, and even lectures, assist the process. But they do not, and should not replace reading, because when we are just watching and listening, somebody is taking very good care that we should not stop and think. The danger in this age is not of our remaining ignorant; it is that we should lose the power of thinking for ourselves. Problems are more and more put before us, but, except to crossword puzzles and detective mysteries, do we attempt to find the answers for ourselves? Less and less. The short cut seems ever more and more desirable. But the short cut to knowledge is nearly always the longest way round. There is nothing like knowledge, picked up by or reasoned out for oneself.

Let the dark and gloomy air be seen buffeted by the rush of contrary winds and dense from the continued rain mingled with hail and bearing hither and thither an infinite number of branches torn from the trees and mixed with numberless leaves. All round may be seen venerable trees, uprooted by the fury of the winds; and fragments of mountains, already scoured bare by the torrents, falling into those torrents and choking their valleys till the swollen rivers overflow and submerge the wide lowlands and their inhabitants. You might see on many of the hill-tops terrified animals of different kinds, collected together and subdued to tameness, in company with men and women who had fled there with their children.

THE WAY I see it, there are three reasons never to be unhappy. First, you were born. This in itself is a remarkable achievement. Did you know that each time your father ejaculated (and frankly he did it quite a lot) he produced roughly twenty-five million spermatozoa – enough to repopulate Britain every two days or so? For you to have been born, not only did you have to be among the few batches of sperm that had even a theoretical chance of prospering – in itself quite a long shot – but you then had to win a race against 24,999,999 or so other wriggling contenders, all rushing to swim the English Channel of your mother’s vagina in order to be the first ashore at the fertile egg of Boulogne, as it were. Being born was easily the most remarkable achievement of your whole life. And think: you could just as easily have been a flatworm. Second, you are alive. For the tiniest moment in the span of eternity you have the miraculous privilege to exist. For endless eons you were not. Soon you will cease to be once more. That you are able to sit here right now in this one never-to-be-repeated moment, reading this book, eating bon-bons, dreaming about hot sex with that scrumptious person from accounts, speculatively sniffing your armpits, doing whatever you are doing – just existing – is really wondrous beyond belief. Third, you have plenty to eat, you live in a time of peace and ‘Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Old Oak Tree’ will never be number one again.

It’s a concept that some people believe in: that the number three stands for that which is solid, real, substantial, complete – for example the three dimensions of length, breadth and height which are necessary to form a solid. There are three great divisions that complete time: the past, the present and the future. Thought, word and deed complete the sum of human capability; animal, vegetable, mineral – the three kingdoms of the natural world. I could go on. For some people, three is such a powerful number that everything has to be finished in threes for them to feel safe. A famous physicist, Nicola Tesla, was so obsessed with the number that he used to walk round the block three times before he would enter a building.’ She

On the other side of the door, bookshelves, thick and study and packed with ancient tomes, lined the rounded walls, all the way up to a ceiling so high one would need several ladders to reach it. Thankfully, there were indeed multiple ladders of aged rosewood, as well as a number of small balconies that dotted the upper shelves like iron stars. The air shifted as Evangeline entered, redolent of old paper pages that called to her like a siren's song. Like all admirers of fairytales, she'd always loved the scent of books. She loved the paper dust in the air, the way it swirled in the light like little sprinkles of magic. And most of all, she loved the way that fairytales always made her think of her mother and endless possibilities.

I am the second Antone Bazil Coutts, but I’d fight anyone who put a junior in back of my name. Or a number. Or called me Bazil. I’d decided I was Joe when I was six. When I was eight, I realized that I’d chosen the name of my great-grandfather, Joseph. I knew him mainly as the author of inscriptions in books with amber pages and dry leather bindings. He’d passed down several shelves of these antiquities. I resented the fact that I didn’t have a brand-new name to distinguish me from the tedious Coutts line—responsible, upright, even offhandedly heroic men who drank quietly, smoked an occasional cigar, drove a sensible car, and only showed their mettle by marrying smarter women. I saw myself as different, though I didn’t know how yet.

The topics round the table narrowed to a single issue – targets. Everyone approved. A policy working group had just completed a paper. If Labour came to power, the public sector was to be made efficient and humane by being set clearly defined outcomes. Fear of failure would raise performance. Fulfilling targets would lift morale. The public interest would be met. To be targeted and increased: breast screenings, apprenticeships, ethnic minorities visiting national parks, kids from disadvantaged backgrounds at universities, literacy levels at ages seven, ten and fourteen, crimes solved, rapists tried and imprisoned, people moved out of unemployment. To be targeted and reduced: numbers of homeless, suicides, schizophrenics, air pollution, Accident and Emergency

I had been wondering about the “slaters,” spelt variously as “slatters,” “sclaters,” and “slatears,” which seemed to be an important ingredient in a number of medicines, so I was pleased to see a clear cork-stoppered vial with this name on the label. The vial was about half-full of what appeared to be small grey pills. These were no more than a quarter-inch in diameter, and so perfectly round that I marveled at Beaton’s dispensing skill. I brought the vial up close to my face, wondering at its lightness. Then I saw the fine striations across each “pill” and the microscopic legs, folded into the central crease. I hastily set the vial down, wiping my hand on my apron, and made another entry in the mental list I had been compiling. For “slaters,” read “woodlice.

Everybody says: the Kremlin, the Kremlin. They all go on about it, but I've never seen it. The number of times (thousands) I've been drunk or hung over, traipsing round Moscow, north-south, east-west, end to end, straight through or any old way - and I've never once seen the Kremlin. For instance, yesterday - yesterday I didn't see it again, though I was buzzing round that area the whole evening and it's not as if I was particularly drunk. I mean, as soon as I came out onto Savyelov Station, I had a glass of Zubrovka for starters, since I know from experience that as an early-morning tipple, nobody's so far dreamed up anything better. Anyway, a glass of Zubrovka. Then after that - on Kalyaev Street - another glass, only not Zubrovka this time, but coriander vodka. A friend of mine used to say coriander had a dehumanizing effect on a person, i.e, it refreshes your parts but it weakens your spirit. For some reason or other it had the opposite effect on me, i.e., my spirit was refreshed, while my parts all went to hell. But I do agree it's dehumanizing, so that's why I topped it up with two glasses of Zhiguli beer, plus some egg-nog straight from the bottle, in the middle of Kalyaev Street. Of course, you're saying: come on, Venya, get on with it — what did you have next? And I couldn't say for sure. I remember - I remember quite distinctly in fact - I had two glasses of Hunter's vodka, on Chekhov Street. But I couldn't have made it across the Sadovy ring road with nothing to drink, I really couldn't. So I must've had something else.

Only optimists thought this possible at the time and even the leaders of the anti-slavery movement did not at first attempt the direct abolition of the institution of slavery itself, hoping instead that stopping the buying and selling of human beings would dry up the source and cause slavery as an institution to wither on the vine. At this juncture in history, Britain was the world's largest slave trader and the powerful vested interests which this created were able to roundly defeat early attempts to get Parliament to ban the trade. In the long run, however, such powerful opposition to the proposed ban, combined with equal tenacity on the other side, simply dragged out the political struggle for decades, making ever wider circles of people aware of the issue. Something that had never been a public issue before now became a subject of inescapable and heated controversy for years on end. Slavery could no longer be accepted as simply one of those facts of life that most people do not bother to think about. The long, drawn-out political controversy meant that more and more people had to think about it—and many who began to think about slavery turned against it. Eventually, such strong feelings were aroused among the British public that anti-slavery petitions with unprecedented numbers of signatures poured into Parliament from around the country, from people in all walks of life, until the mounting political pressures forced not only a banning of the international slave trade in 1808, but eventually swept the anti-slavery forces on beyond their original goals toward the direct abolition of the institution of slavery itself.

The red energy center often is in the shape of the spoked wheel. The orange energy center in the flower shape containing three petals. The yellow center again in a rounded shape, many faceted, as a star. The green energy center sometimes called the lotus-shape, the number of points of crystalline structure dependent upon the strength of this center. The blue energy center capable of having perhaps one hundred facets and capable of great flashing brilliance. The indigo center a more quiet center which has the basic triangular, or three-petaled, shape in many, although some adepts who have balanced the lower energies may create more faceted forms. The violet energy center is the least variable and is sometimes described in your philosophy as thousand-petaled, as it is the sum of the mind/body/spirit complex distortion

Then don’t think of it as faith. Think of it simply as changing your perspective, accepting that the world is not precisely as you imagine. Historically, every major scientific breakthrough began with a simple idea that threatened to overturn all of our beliefs. The simple statement ‘the earth is round’ was mocked as utterly impossible because most people believed the oceans would flow off the planet. Heliocentricity was called heresy. Small minds have always lashed out at what they don’t understand. There are those who create . . . and those who tear down. That dynamic has existed for all time. But eventually the creators find believers, and the number of believers reaches a critical mass, and suddenly the world becomes round, or the solar system becomes heliocentric. Perception is transformed, and a new reality is born.

BÉGEARSS [very conceited]. My dear, there’s nothing to it. To start with, there are just two things that make the world go round: morality and politics. Morality, a very footling thing, means being fair and honest. It is, so they say, the basis of a number of rather boring virtues.[...] Politics is the art of making things happen, of leading people and events by the nose: it’s child’s play. Its purpose is self-interest, its method intrigue. Always economical with the truth, it has boundless, dazzling possibilities which stand like a beacon and draw you on. As deep as Etna, it smoulders and rumbles for a long time before finally erupting into the light of day. By then nothing can stop it. It calls for superior talents and is threatened by only one thing: honest principles. [He laughs] That’s the key to all the deals that are ever made!

Trump wanted to know what the new individual income tax rates would be. “I like these big round numbers,” he said. “Ten percent, 20 percent, 25 percent.” Good, solid numbers that would be easy to sell. Mnuchin, Cohn and Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney said there needed to be analysis, study and discussion on the impact on revenue, the deficit and the relation to expected federal spending. “I want to know what the numbers are going to be,” Trump said, throwing out numbers again. “I think they ought to be 10, 20 and 25.” He dismissed any effort to crunch the numbers. A small change in rates could have a surprising impact on taxes collected by the U.S. Treasury. “I don’t care about any of that,” Trump said. Solid, round numbers were key. “That’s what people can understand,” he said. “That’s how I’m going to sell it.

Makar had come, however, with more in mind than the message about the closing of the mission. He had asked to be the one to deliver that message because he wanted to sound me out on the possibility of going into Russia. He told me that he and Father Victor Nestrov, another of my classmates from our years at the Russicum, had discussed with their superiors the possibility of Jesuits accompanying labor brigades to the Soviet Union in order to minister to their needs. The plan was simple enough. The Soviets were hiring large numbers from the occupied zones to work in Russian factories around the Ural Mountains. They had also been rounding up suspects of all kinds and shipping them off to work camps in the Urals. Makar and Nestrov talked quite simply of going with some of these laborers across the Russian border. But they knew I would want to join them.

Sarah's first introduction was the signature sugardoodle. Big, billowy, and buttery, sparkling with a generous coating of sugar crystals and cinnamon, it has the perfect savory-sweet balance that comes from creamed butter and sugar. When she created it, the bakery's cookie menu was dominated by chocolaty options. She was looking to add something with a different flavor profile. Then, for the 2013 holiday season, she was playing with recipe ideas that would evoke nostalgia and home baking and struck upon the ginger spice cookie, a soft, sweet molasses number with the bite of ginger, cinnamon, and nutmeg. It was so popular it stuck around beyond the holidays and became a year-round best seller. Then came the killer red velvet. Rich from cocoa, savory from a cream-cheese center, and crunchy from its sugar-dusted top, it gives red velvet lovers a whole new creation to die for.

We were advancing at good speed up a wide track towards a village when the VC and NVA laid down a very heavy mortar bombardment, at the same time they opened up with medium machine guns in enfilading fire. We saw the South Viet Marines to our left break for the rear. Then amidst the dust and smoke came quite a number of VC and NVA infantry yelling and brandishing Ak rifles with bayonets fixed and throwing grenades. As the South Viets were running we bolted too, for the mortar rounds were dropping thick and fast on the track behind us and among the trees. Then down came our own fire mission, quickly followed by our guys and the South Viets rushing to counter-attack with lots of rifle fire and the throwing of grenades. The VC and NVA scuttled off to the village, and the situation restored. Sergeant Walker, the author of Southlands Snuffys, after- action report, Forest of Assassins, 1967.

The system used to elect members of the legislatures of most countries in the British political tradition is that each district (or ‘constituency’) in the country is entitled to one seat in the legislature, and that seat goes to the candidate with the largest number of votes in that district. This is called the plurality voting system (‘plurality’ meaning ‘largest number of votes’) – often called the ‘first-past-the-post’ system, because there is no prize for any runner-up, and no second round of voting (both of which feature in other electoral systems for the sake of increasing the proportionality of the outcomes). Plurality voting typically ‘over-represents’ the two largest parties, compared with the proportion of votes they receive. Moreover, it is not guaranteed to avoid the population paradox, and is even capable of bringing one party to power when another has received far more votes in total.

You cannot imagine, to give you another example, that you may have, one day, a prime minister (it would go against my modesty to breathe his name) who, one day, after announcing in Parliament, in a cool, impassive voice, that, as the result of a number of carefully thought out diplomatic manoeuvres he has refrained from discussing before (for he is not a man of many words), he has succeeded in annexing Britain as an ordinary colony of Hungary, and that he is taking this opportunity to apprise the House of the fact; - Well, as I say, after explaining this in a cool and impassive tone, ignoring the shouting, jubilant Members who want to carry him round on their shoulders, suddenly he takes up a fencing posture and, right there, on the premier's rostrum, employing a formidable, hitherto unknown jujitsu hold, floors the Australian world wrestling champion whom the British opposition treacherously hid under the rostrum in order to assassinate the greatest European.

My personal favorite version of the game, Speed Scrabble, is played with tiles only. Each player selects seven tiles. At the call to start, each player turns over his or her tiles. Using these letters, the player creates an individual grid of six letters, with two or possibly three intersecting words, selecting one letter to pass along. The first player to finish calls out the word switch, passes the rejected tiles to the player at the right, and turns over two new tiles from the general pile. Each player then incorporates the new tiles into his or her grid, always rejecting one to pass along at the word switch. Obvious rejects are Q and Z, which usually get passed around. The game is played until the tiles are depleted and one person calls out the word finished. If no one has any questions about the winner's grid, the points on the tiles are added up. Losers deduct the number of points of the unused letters. Each round takes about fifteen or twenty minutes max...

With the two sides entrenched, each began a campaign for public sympathy. The focus was wages. How much did Lawrence textile workers really earn? Ettor told the press that the average mill wage was $6 a week; mill owners countered that it was $9.71 The difference depended on who did the math, and how. Ettor was using a mathematical mean, dividing the mills’ $150,000 weekly payroll by twenty-five thousand workers.72 Mill owners relied on what statisticians call the median. Taking a weaver’s average wage of $13 a week and a doffer’s average of $4.50, they found the midpoint, then rounded up. Strikers protested. For every weaver, they pointed out, there were dozens of doffers, sweepers, and bobbin boys earning $4.50 a week or less. Mill owners countered that such low pay was earned only by the least skilled workers, few in number and not prime wage earners. But neither weekly wage figure factored in the several weeks each year that work was slow and thousands were laid off.

A large brand will typically spend between 10 and 20 percent of their media buy on creative,” DeJulio explains. “So if they have a $500 million media budget, there’s somewhere between $50 to $100 million going toward creating content. For that money they’ll get seven to ten pieces of content, but not right away. If you’re going to spend $1 million on one piece of content, it’s going to take a long time—six months, nine months, a year—to fully develop. With this budget and timeline, brands have no margin to take chances creatively.” By contrast, the Tongal process: If a brand wants to crowdsource a commercial, the first step is to put up a purse—anywhere from $50,000 to $200,000. Then, Tongal breaks the project into three phases: ideation, production, and distribution, allowing creatives with different specialties (writing, directing, animating, acting, social media promotion, and so on) to focus on what they do best. In the first competition—the ideation phase—a client creates a brief describing its objective. Tongal members read the brief and submit their best ideas in 500 characters (about three tweets). Customers then pick a small number of ideas they like and pay a small portion of the purse to these winners. Next up is production, where directors select one of the winning concepts and submit their take. Another round of winners are selected and these folks are given the time and money to crank out their vision. But this phase is not just limited to these few winning directors. Tongal also allows anyone to submit a wild card video. Finally, sponsors select their favorite video (or videos), the winning directors get paid, and the winning videos get released to the world. Compared to the seven to ten pieces of content the traditional process produces, Tongal competitions generate an average of 422 concepts in the idea phase, followed by an average of 20 to 100 finished video pieces in the video production phase. That is a huge return for the invested dollars and time.

A few years ago, the British chocolate manufacturer Cadbury’s received a large number of customer complaints, claiming that they had changed the taste of their Dairy Milk brand. They were at first baffled, because the formulation hadn’t been altered for years. However, what they had done was change the shapes of the blocks you would break off a bar, rounding their corners. And smoother shapes taste sweeter. Truly. Nothing about perception is completely objective, even though we act as though it is. When we complain that a room is hot, there may be no point at which we agree about what ‘hot’ means; it may merely mean ‘a few degrees warmer than the room I was in previously, to which I have become acclimatised’. ‘Time flies when you are having fun’ is an early piece of psychophysical insight. To your watch, an hour always means exactly the same thing, regardless of whether you are drinking champagne or being waterboarded. However, to the human brain, the perception of time is more elastic.*

The down side is that more and more of them keep coming. The noise is like a dinner bell. Hungries are crowding into the green space from the streets on every side, at what you’d have to call a dead run. There’s no limit to their numbers, and there is a limit to his ammo. Which he hits, suddenly. The gun stops vibrating in his hands and the noise of his shots dies away through layers of echoes. He ejects the empty magazine, gropes for another in his pocket. He’s done this so often he could go through the moves in his sleep. Slap the new mag in and give it a quick, sharp tug, pivoting it on the forward lip so it locks into place. Pull the bolt all the way back. The bolt sticks halfway. The weapon’s just dead weight until he can clear whatever’s jamming it–the first round, most likely, elbowed in the chamber. And two hungries are on top of him now, triangulating from left and right. One of them used to be a man, the other a woman. They’re about a second away from the world’s nastiest three-way. It’s

Let’s say experiment A is testing a small change, such as the color of the sign-up button. As results start coming in, it becomes clear that the increase in the number of new visitors signing up is very small—garnering just 5 percent more sign-ups than the original button color. Besides the obvious assumption that changing the color of the sign-up button may not be the key factor holding back new users from signing up, it’s also an indication that you’ll have to let the experiment run quite a long time in order to have enough data to make a solid conclusion. As you can see from the chart above, to reach statistically significant results for this test, you’d need a whopping 72,300 visitors per variant—or, in other words, you’d have to wait 72 days to get conclusive results. As Johns put it in an interview with First Round Review, “That’s a lifetime when you’re a start-up!” In a case like this what a start-up really ought to do is abandon the experiment quickly and move on to a next, potentially higher-impact, one.

I dial her mum's number, then sit down cross-legged, facing the wall. When she comes on the line, she sounds uncertain, hesitant. 'Hey! Guess where I am?' I ask, my voice loud with false cheer. 'Rami told me. The Wellesly Hospital in Worthing. What's it like?' 'For a loony-bin it's actually quite decent,' I reply. 'I don't have Sky or an en-suite, and the menu isn't exactly à la carte, but you know...' I tail off. There is a silence. 'Do you have your own room?' Jenna asks, 'Oh yeah, yeah. I have a lovely view of the sea between the bars of my window.' She doesn't laugh. 'Have you started' -there is a pause as she searches for the right word -'threatment?' 'Yeah, yeah. We had group therapy today. Tomorrow we'll probably have art therapy - maybe I'll draw you a hourse and a garden. I know, perhaps they'll teach us to make baskets! Isn't that why they call us basket cases?' 'Flynn, stop,' Jennah softly implores. 'And we'll probably have music therapy the day after. Maybe I'll get to play the tambourine. Or the triangle. I've always wanted to play the triangle!' 'Flynn-' 'No, I'm serious! I'll ask for some manuscript paper and see if I can write a composition for tambourine and triangle. Then I can post if off to you to hand in for my next composition assignment.' 'Flynn, listen-' 'Hold on, hold on! I'm making a note to myself now: Find fellow insane musician and start composing the Flynn Laukonen Sonata for Tambourine and Triangle.' 'Flynn-' 'And then, when they let me out, if they ever let me out, perhaps you could pull a few strigns and organize for me and my tambourine buddy to give a recital. I'm not sure where though -how about the subway at Marble Arch tube? Nice and central, good acoustics-' 'What are the other people like?' Jennah cuts in, an edge to her voice. I notice she doesn't use the word patients. Clever Jennah. For a moment there you almost made me forget I was locked up in a mental institution. 'Round the bend, just like me,' I reply. 'I'm in excellent company. We'll be swapping suicide tips in no time at all!' I give a harsh laugh.

1. Start with your base. Bases come in convenient stick form, but I prefer a liquid one. A sallow skin need a pinkish tone. For a ruddy complexion, beige is flattering. Smooth the base right up to the hairline (you can always wipe spots off the hair with a tissue later) and blend it around the ears, on the earlobe, and down over the neck. 2. If your face is very round, smooth a darker shade at the sides, below the cheekbone, to narrow it. If your nose is too long, put the darker shade at the tip, and at the sides of the nostrils,. There are a number of possibilities depending on your bone structure. 3. A lighter shade will bring out receding features. [...]Use pale pink just under the brow and under the brow and under the eyes to bring out deep-set eyes. I don't use white under my brows because my bone structure doesn't lend itself to that. [...] I hate to see girls with TOO much white under the brow - or too much eye makeup of any kind, for that matter. If the forehead protrudes they shouldn't use the white under the brows at all. It exaggerates it. And if they have a tendency to be puffy - and everybody has puffy days - they look worse with great white blobs under the eyes. 4. The important thing about shading and contouring is to blend so carefully that you can never see where one shade ends and the other begins. 5. So start with three shades of base for the redesigning, plus white if you need it. Add a blusher that you brush on with a large soft brush made for the purpose. I like a brownish shade. It matches my natural complexion and I brush it on under my cheekbones to accent my bone structure. But a very fair skin could use a bluish pink blusher... 5. Translucent powder goes on next. It must be translucent or your careful job of shading will be covered over. And not too much. Just light dusting of it to cover the shine... 6. After powdering, take a tissue and BLOT. Then clothes won't get soiled. 7. I put on the lipstick and smooth it over with my finger - I never rub my lips together. Then I outline the lips carefully with a lipstick pencil. I never use a brush. Then BLOT. There's nothing uglier than lipstick on the teeth.

We met with no Indians, but we found the places on the neighboring hills where they had lain to watch our proceedings. There was an art in their contrivance of those places, that seems worth mention. It being winter, a fire was necessary for them; but a common fire on the surface of the ground would by its light have discovered their position at a distance. They had therefore dug holes in the ground about three feet diameter, and somewhat deeper; we saw where they had with their hatchets cut off the charcoal from the sides of burnt logs lying in the woods. With these coals they had made small fires in the bottom of the holes, and we observ'd among the weeds and grass the prints of their bodies, made by their laying all round, with their legs hanging down in the holes to keep their feet warm, which, with them, is an essential point. This kind of fire, so manag'd, could not discover them, either by its light, flame, sparks, or even smoke: it appear'd that their number was not great, and it seems they saw we were too many to be attacked by them with prospect of advantage.

Erroneous plurals of nouns, as vallies or echos. Barbarous compound nouns, as viewpoint or upkeep. Want of correspondence in number between noun and verb where the two are widely separated or the construction involved. Ambiguous use of pronouns. Erroneous case of pronouns, as whom for who, and vice versa, or phrases like “between you and I,” or “Let we who are loyal, act promptly.” Erroneous use of shall and will, and of other auxiliary verbs. Use of intransitive for transitive verbs, as “he was graduated from college,” or vice versa, as “he ingratiated with the tyrant.” Use of nouns for verbs, as “he motored to Boston,” or “he voiced a protest.” Errors in moods and tenses of verbs, as “If I was he, I should do otherwise,” or “He said the earth was round.” The split infinitive, as “to calmly glide.” The erroneous perfect infinitive, as “Last week I expected to have met you.” False verb-forms, as “I pled with him.” Use of like for as, as “I strive to write like Pope wrote.” Misuse of prepositions, as “The gift was bestowed to an unworthy object,” or “The gold was divided between the five men.” The superfluous conjunction, as “I wish for you to do this.” Use of words in wrong senses, as “The book greatly intrigued me,” “Leave me take this,” “He was obsessed with the idea,” or “He is a meticulous writer.” Erroneous use of non-Anglicised foreign forms, as “a strange phenomena,” or “two stratas of clouds.” Use of false or unauthorized words, as burglarize or supremest. Errors of taste, including vulgarisms, pompousness, repetition, vagueness, ambiguousness, colloquialism, bathos, bombast, pleonasm, tautology, harshness, mixed metaphor, and every sort of rhetorical awkwardness. Errors of spelling and punctuation, and confusion of forms such as that which leads many to place an apostrophe in the possessive pronoun its. Of all blunders, there is hardly one which might not be avoided through diligent study of simple textbooks on grammar and rhetoric, intelligent perusal of the best authors, and care and forethought in composition. Almost no excuse exists for their persistent occurrence, since the sources of correction are so numerous and so available.

There were many skies. The sky was invaded by great white clouds, flat on the bottom but round and billowy on top. The sky was completely cloudless, of a blue quite shattering to the senses. The sky was a heavy, suffocating blanket of grey cloud, but without promise of rain. The sky was thinly overcast. The sky was dappled with small, white, fleecy clouds. The sky was streaked with high, thin clouds that looked like a cotton ball stretched a part. The sky was a featureless milky haze. The sky was a density of dark and blustery rain clouds that passed by without delivering rain. The sky was painted with a small number of flat clouds that looked like sandbars. The sky was a mere block to allow a visual effect on the horizon: sunlight flooding the ocean, the vertical edges of between light and shadow perfectly distinct. The sky was a distant black curtain of falling rain. The sky was many clouds at many levels, some thick and opaque, others looking like smoke. The sky was black and spitting on my smiling face. The sky was nothing but falling water, a ceaseless deluge that wrinkled and bloated my skin and froze me stiff.

Cam awakened slowly as he felt his wife’s voluptuous body snuggling close to his. She always slept in a nightgown made of modest white cambric, with infinite numbers of tucks and tiny ruffles. It never failed to stir him, knowing what splendid curves were concealed beneath the demure garment. The nightgown had ridden up to her knees during the night. One of her bare legs was hooked over his, her knee resting near his groin. The slight roundness of her stomach pressed against his side. Pregnancy had made her feminine form more ample and delicious. There was a glow about her these days, a burgeoning vulnerability that filled him with an overwhelming urge to protect her. And knowing that the changes in her were caused by his seed, a part of him growing inside her … that was undeniably arousing. He wouldn’t have expected to be this enthralled by Amelia’s condition. In the eyes of the Rom, childbirth and all related issues were considered mahrime, polluting events. And since the Irish were notoriously suspicious and prudish when it came to matters of reproduction, there wasn’t much on either side of his lineage to justify his delight in his wife’s pregnancy. But he couldn’t help it. She was the most beautiful and fascinating creature he had ever encountered.

For the briefest of seconds, it was like he looked back into the stands, like maybe he spotted me, shaking my rattle, giving him all the encouragement I could. I could have sworn I saw a corner of his mouth curl up. Then he did the whole Velcro batting glove thing and stepped up to the plate. The pitch came. He swung. Crack! He hit it! He hit it! I jumped up and started shouting. I had a second to see the stunned look on his face, like maybe he’d never hit the ball before, but that couldn’t be… And then I realized what it was. As he started running, he turned his head, his gaze following the ball… The ball that went out of the ballpark! Right over the Backyard Mania billboard! Home run! My boyfriend had hit a home run! I jumped around, pointing at the number on my jersey, hugging Bird, hugging Tiffany, watching Jason slapping his coach’s hand as he rounded third. I watched him cross home plate, wearing the biggest grin on his face. “You know what this means, don’t you?” Bird said. “That we’re ahead two to nothing?” “It means he’ll insist you sit in this exact spot for every game. He’ll think this is the good luck spot.” “No way.” “Either that, or he’ll ask you not to wash your underwear.” “Ew! That’s so not happening. Maybe I can convince him it was wearing the jersey.” Yeah, I thought. That’s the ticket.

Janie ran to my side, where she tugged at the book eagerly as though she'd seen it before. "Flower book," she said, pointing to the cover. "Where did you find Mummy's book?" Katherine asked, hovering near me. Cautiously, I revealed the book as I sat on the sofa. "Would you like to look at it with me?" I said, avoiding the question. Katherine nodded and the boys gathered round as I cracked the spine and thumbed through page after page of beautiful camellias, pressed and glued onto each page, with handwritten notes next to each. On the page that featured the 'Camellia reticulata,' a large, salmon-colored flower, she had written: 'Edward had this one brought in from China. It's fragile. I've given it the garden's best shade.' On the next page, near the 'Camellia sasanqua,' she wrote: 'A christmas gift from Edward and the children. This one will need extra love. It hardly survived the passage from Japan. I will spend the spring nursing it back to health.' On each page, there were meticulous notes about the care and feeding of the camellias- when she planted them, how often they were watered, fertilized, and pruned. In the right-hand corner of some pages, I noticed an unusual series of numbers. "What does that mean?" I asked the children. Nicholas shrugged. "This one was Mummy's favorite," he said, flipping to the last page in the book. I marveled at the pink-tipped white blossoms as my heart began to beat faster. The Middlebury Pink.

Even harder to solve is the translation of ‘virtù’, together with a number of other words that cluster round it. It would be so easy to write the English cognate ‘virtue’, meaning the opposite of vice, but this is not what Machiavelli was talking about. He was not interested in the polarity ‘good’/‘evil’, but in winning and losing, strength and weakness, success and failure. For Machiavelli ‘virtù’ was any quality of character that enabled you to take political power or to hold on to it; in short, a winning trait. It could be courage in battle, or strength of personality, or political cunning, or it might even be the kind of ruthless cruelty that lets your subjects know you mean business. But one can hardly write ‘cunning’ or ‘cruelty’ for ‘virtù’, even if one knows that in this context that is what the text means; because then you would lose the sense that although Machiavelli is not talking about the moral virtues he nevertheless wants to give a positive connotation to the particular qualities he is talking about: this cruelty is aimed at solving problems, retaining power, keeping a state strong, hence, in this context it is a ‘virtù’. Ugly though it may sound, then, I have sometimes been obliged to translate ‘virtù’ as ‘positive qualities’ or ‘strength of character’, except of course on those occasions - because there are some - when Machiavelli does mean ‘virtues’ in the moral sense: in which case he’s usually talking about the importance of faking them even if you may not have them

…the lump of glass had its place upon the mantelpiece, where it stood heavy upon a little pile of bills and letters and served not only as an excellent paper-weight, but also as a natural stopping place for the young man's eyes when they wandered from his book. Looked at again and again half consciously by a mind thinking of something else, any object mixes itself so profoundly with the stuff of thought that it loses its actual form and recomposes itself a little differently in an ideal shape which haunts the brain when we least expect it. So John found himself attracted to the windows of curiosity shops when he was out walking, merely because he saw something which reminded him of the lump of glass. Anything, so long as it was an object of some kind, more or less round, perhaps with a dying flame deep sunk in its mass, anything—china, glass, amber, rock, marble—even the smooth oval egg of a prehistoric bird would do. He took, also, to keeping his eyes upon the ground, especially in the neighbourhood of waste land where the household refuse is thrown away. Such objects often occurred there—thrown away, of no use to anybody, shapeless, discarded. In a few months he had collected four or five specimens that took their place upon the mantelpiece. They were useful, too, for a man who is standing for Parliament upon the brink of a brilliant career has any number of papers to keep in order—addresses to constituents, declarations of policy, appeals for subscriptions, invitations to dinner, and so on. __ from 'The Solid Object

Japan is obsessed with French pastry. Yes, I know everyone who has access to French pastry is obsessed with it, but in Tokyo they've taken it another level. When a patissier becomes sufficiently famous in Paris, they open a shop in Tokyo; the department store food halls feature Pierre Herme, Henri Charpentier, and Sadaharu Aoki, who was born in Tokyo but became famous for his Japanese-influenced pastries in Paris before opening shops in his hometown. And don't forget the famous Mister Donut, which I just made up. Our favorite French pastry shop is run by a Japanese chef, Terai Norihiko, who studied in France and Belgium and opened a small shop called Aigre-Douce, in the Mejiro neighborhood. Aigre-Douce is a pastry museum, the kind of place where everything looks too beautiful to eat. On her first couple of visits, Iris chose a gooey caramel brownie concoction, but she and Laurie soon sparred over the affections of Wallace, a round two-layer cake with lime cream atop chocolate, separated by a paper-thin square chocolate wafer. "Wallace is a one-woman man," said Laurie. Iris giggled in the way eight-year-olds do at anything that smacks of romance. We never figured out why they named a cake Wallace. I blame IKEA. I've always been more interested in chocolate than fruit desserts, but for some reason, perhaps because it was summer and the fruit desserts looked so good and I was not quite myself the whole month, I gravitated toward the blackberry and raspberry items, like a cup of raspberry puree with chantilly cream and a layer of sponge cake.

Now the moment had arrived. Birgit took her place beside him in the command car. She pulled up her large striped cotton dirndl skirt made by her fellow national, Katya of Sweden, and looked around with an excited smile. But to onlookers it was more like the strained expression of a Swedish farm woman in a Swedish outhouse in the dead of a Swedish winter. She was trying to restrain her excitement at the sight of all those naked limbs in the amber light. From the shoulders up she had the delicate neckline and face of a Nordic goddess, but below her body was breastless, lumpy with bulging hips and huge round legs like sawed-off telegraph posts. She felt elated, sitting there with her man who was leading these colored people in this march for their rights. She loved colored people. Her eyeblue eyes gleamed with this love. When she looked at the white cops her lips curled with scorn. A number of police cruisers had appeared at the moment the march was to begin. They stared at the white woman and the colored man in the command car. Their lips compressed but they said nothing, did nothing. Marcus had got a police permit. The marchers lined up four abreast on the right side of the street, facing west. The command car was at the lead. Two police cars brought up the rear. Three were parked at intervals down the street as far as the railroad station. Several others cruised slowly in the westbound traffic, turned north at Lenox Avenue, east again on 126th Street, back to 125th Street on Second Avenue and retraced the route. The chief inspector had said he didn’t want any trouble in Harlem. “Squads, MARCH!” Marcus shouted over the amplifier.

Fatigued by her journey, the Countess soon after supper proposed retiring to rest; a proposal extremely agreeable to Madeline, whose spirits still felt agitated. The Countess conducted her to her chamber, which was near her own, and at the end of a long gallery that overlooked the hall; here they parted; but a servant remained, who offered to assist Madeline in undressing; an offer which she, never accustomed to such attendance, refused; and, feeling a restraint in her presence, dismissed her; yet scarcely had she done so, ere she felt an uneasy sensation, something like fear, stealing over her mind as she looked round her spacious and gloomy apartment; nor could she prevent herself from starting as the tapestry, which represented a number of grotesque and frightful figures, agitated by the wind that whistled through the crevices, every now and then swelled from the walls. She sat down near the door, wishing herself again in her own little chamber, and attentively listening for a passing step that she might desire the servant she had dismissed to be recalled; but all was profoundly still, and continued so; and at length she recollected herself, blushed for the weakness she had betrayed; and, recommending herself to the protection of heaven, retired to bed, where she soon forgot her cares and fears. She awoke in the morning with renovated spirits; and, impatient to gratify her curiosity by examining the contents of the chamber, instantly rose: the furniture was rich but old-fashioned; and as she looked over the great presses and curious inlaid cabinets, she thought indeed she must have not only a great fortune, but great vanity if she could ever fill them.

The tyro knows nothing, and everybody, including himself, knows it. But the next, or second, grade thinks he knows a great deal and makes others feel that way too. He is the experienced sucker, who has studied not the market itself but a few remarks about the market made by a still higher grade of suckers. The second-grade sucker knows how to keep from losing his money in some of the ways that get the raw beginner. It is this semisucker rather than the 100 per cent article who is the real all-the-year-round support of the commission houses. He lasts about three and a half years on an average, as compared with a single season of from three to thirty weeks, which is the usual Wall Street life of a first offender. It is naturally the semisucker who is always quoting the famous trading aphorisms and the various rules of the game. He knows all the don'ts that ever fell from the oracular lips of the old stagers excepting the principal one, which is: Don't be a sucker! This semisucker is the type that thinks he has cut his wisdom teeth because he loves to buy on declines. He waits for them. He measures his bargains by the number of points it has sold off from the top. In big bull markets the plain unadulterated sucker, utterly ignorant of rules and precedents, buys blindly because he hopes blindly. He makes most of the money until one of the healthy reactions takes it away from him at one fell swoop. But the Careful Mike sucker does what I did when I thought I was playing the game intelligently according to the intelligence of others. I knew I needed to change my bucket-shop methods and I thought I was solving my problem with any change, particularly one that assayed high gold values according to the experienced traders among the customers.

The seventh day, and no wind—the burning sun Blister’d and scorch’d, and, stagnant on the sea, They lay like carcasses; and hope was none, Save in the breeze that came not; savagely They glared upon each other—all was done, Water, and wine, and food,—and you might see The longings of the cannibal arise (Although they spoke not) in their wolfish eyes. At length one whisper’d his companion, who Whisper’d another, and thus it went round, And then into a hoarser murmur grew, An ominous, and wild, and desperate sound; And when his comrade’s thought each sufferer knew, ’Twas but his own, suppress’d till now, he found: And out they spoke of lots for flesh and blood, And who should die to be his fellow’s food. But ere they came to this, they that day shared Some leathern caps, and what remain’d of shoes; And then they look’d around them and despair’d, And none to be the sacrifice would choose; At length the lots were torn up, and prepared, But of materials that much shock the Muse— Having no paper, for the want of better, They took by force from Juan Julia’s letter. The lots were made, and mark’d, and mix’d, and handed, In silent horror, and their distribution Lull’d even the savage hunger which demanded, Like the Promethean vulture, this pollution; None in particular had sought or plann’d it, ’Twas nature gnaw’d them to this resolution, By which none were permitted to be neuter— And the lot fell on Juan’s luckless tutor. He but requested to be bled to death: The surgeon had his instruments, and bled Pedrillo, and so gently ebb’d his breath, You hardly could perceive when he was dead. He died as born, a Catholic in faith, Like most in the belief in which they’re bred, And first a little crucifix he kiss’d, And then held out his jugular and wrist. The surgeon, as there was no other fee, Had his first choice of morsels for his pains; But being thirstiest at the moment, he Preferr’d a draught from the fast-flowing veins: Part was divided, part thrown in the sea, And such things as the entrails and the brains Regaled two sharks, who follow’d o’er the billow The sailors ate the rest of poor Pedrillo. The sailors ate him, all save three or four, Who were not quite so fond of animal food; To these was added Juan, who, before Refusing his own spaniel, hardly could Feel now his appetite increased much more; ’Twas not to be expected that he should, Even in extremity of their disaster, Dine with them on his pastor and his master. ’Twas better that he did not; for, in fact, The consequence was awful in the extreme; For they, who were most ravenous in the act, Went raging mad—Lord! how they did blaspheme! And foam and roll, with strange convulsions rack’d, Drinking salt water like a mountain-stream, Tearing, and grinning, howling, screeching, swearing, And, with hyaena-laughter, died despairing. Their numbers were much thinn’d by this infliction, And all the rest were thin enough, Heaven knows; And some of them had lost their recollection, Happier than they who still perceived their woes; But others ponder’d on a new dissection, As if not warn’d sufficiently by those Who had already perish’d, suffering madly, For having used their appetites so sadly. And if Pedrillo’s fate should shocking be, Remember Ugolino condescends To eat the head of his arch-enemy The moment after he politely ends His tale: if foes be food in hell, at sea ’Tis surely fair to dine upon our friends, When shipwreck’s short allowance grows too scanty, Without being much more horrible than Dante.

Another secret organization that tries to influence world politics is the Bilderberg Group, founded in 1954 by Prince Bernhard van Lippe Biesterfeld and Joseph Retinger. This group consists of a number of permanent members that form a small core, and a number of changing members that are invited to take part in conferences. The members meet once a year behind closed doors. The Inner Circle, that is the Round Table, consists of nine members of the Bilderberg Group. Then there is a decision making forum that consists of thirteen members. Finally there are three more members that make up the Inner Circles. These consist of members of the black nobility and other exceptionally influential men. Despite the strict confidentiality and secrecy surrounding the Bilderberg Group, some of their objectives got out. The following objectives are strived for: An international economic Power Block. Founding an international Parliament. Creating an international “World Army” through the abolition of national armed forces. Restriction of the power of national governments in favor of a unique and coordinated World Government. Traditionally the international press never mentions anything about the content of the off-the-record discussions. Sometimes a conference where prominent members from the world of politics, business and society speak confidentially about international questions is mentioned briefly. It is always mentioned that the participants assist as private persons, not in their official occupations. However it is striking that the participants of every Bilderberg conference are flown in from all parts of the world with airplanes and helicopters belonging to different air forces. Also, the large police force used to prevent disturbances and protect the invited is paid for by the tax contributors.[48]

Why Does He Do That? That's the number one question, isn't it? Maybe it's his drinking, you say. Maybe it's his learning disabilities. It's his job; he hates it. He's stressed. I think he's bipolar. It's his mother's fault; she spoiled him rotten. It's the drugs. If only he didn't use. It's his temper. He's selfish. It's the pornography; he's obsessed. The list could go on and on. You could spend many years trying to pinpoint it and never get a definite answer. The fact is, many people have these problems and they aren't abusive. Just because someone is an alcoholic doesn't mean he is abusive. Men hate their jobs all the time and aren't abusive. Bipolar? Okay. Stressed? Who isn't! Do you see where I am going with this? Off the subject a bit, when someone commits a violent crime, they always report in the news about his possible motive. As human beings, we need to somehow make sense of things. If someone murders someone, do you think it makes the family of the victim feel better to know the murderer's motive? No. Except for self-defense, there really is no excuse for murder. Motive, if there is any, is irrelevant. The same is true of abuse. You could spend your whole life going round and round trying to figure out why. The truth is, the why doesn't matter. There are only two reasons why men commit abuse—because they want to do so and because they can. You want to know why. In many ways, you might feel like you need to know. But, if you could come up with a reason or a motive, it wouldn't help you. Maybe you believe that if you did this or that differently, he wouldn't have abused you. That is faulty thinking and won't help you get better. You didn't do anything to cause the abuse. No matter what you said, no matter what you did, you didn't deserve to be abused. You are the victim and it won't help you to know why he supposedly abused you. No matter what his reason, there is no excuse for abuse. You are not to blame. —Beth Praed

But now, when he thought how regularly things went on, from day to day, in the same unvarying round; how youth and beauty died, and ugly griping age lived tottering on; how crafty avarice grew rich, and manly honest hearts were poor and sad; how few they were who tenanted the stately houses, and how many of those who lay in noisome pens, or rose each day and laid them down each night, and lived and died, father and son, mother and child, race upon race, and generation upon generation, without a home to shelter them or the energies of one single man directed to their aid; how, in seeking, not a luxurious and splendid life, but the bare means of a most wretched and inadequate subsistence, there were women and children in that one town, divided into classes, numbered and estimated as regularly as the noble families and folks of great degree, and reared from infancy to drive most criminal and dreadful trades; how ignorance was punished and never taught; how jail-doors gaped, and gallows loomed, for thousands urged towards them by circumstances darkly curtaining their very cradles’ heads, and but for which they might have earned their honest bread and lived in peace; how many died in soul, and had no chance of life; how many who could scarcely go astray, be they vicious as they would, turned haughtily from the crushed and stricken wretch who could scarce do otherwise, and who would have been a greater wonder had he or she done well, than even they had they done ill; how much injustice, misery, and wrong, there was, and yet how the world rolled on, from year to year, alike careless and indifferent, and no man seeking to remedy or redress it; when he thought of all this, and selected from the mass the one slight case on which his thoughts were bent, he felt, indeed, that there was little ground for hope, and little reason why it should not form an atom in the huge aggregate of distress and sorrow, and add one small and unimportant unit to swell the great amount.

In Nevada, at Frenchman’s Flat, a bright flash and ugly mushroom cloud had signified a gigantic change in the tactical battlefield—a change that had not come about at Hiroshima, despite statements to the contrary. In its early years the atomic device had remained a strategic weapon, suitable for delivery against cities and industries, suitable to obliterate civilians, men, women, and children by the millions, but of no practical use on a limited battlefield—until it was fired from a field gun. Until this time, 1953, the armies of the world, including that of the United States, had hardly taken the advent of fissionable material into account. The 280mm gun, an interim weapon that would remain in use only a few years, changed all that, forever. With an atomic cannon that could deliver tactical fires in the low-kiloton range, with great selectivity, ground warfare stood on the brink of its greatest change since the advent of firepower. The atomic cannon could blow any existing fortification, even one twenty thousand yards in depth, out of existence neatly and selectively, along with the battalions that manned it. Any concentration of manpower, also, was its meat. It spelled the doom of Communist massed armies, which opposed superior firepower with numbers, and which had in 1953 no tactical nuclear weapons of their own. The 280mm gun was shipped to the Far East. Then, in great secrecy, atomic warheads—it could fire either nuclear or conventional rounds—followed, not to Korea, but to storage close by. And with even greater secrecy, word of this shipment was allowed to fall into Communist hands. At the same time, into Communist hands wafted a pervasive rumor, one they could neither completely verify nor scotch: that the United States would not accept a stalemate beyond the end of summer. The psychological pressures on Chinese Intelligence became enormous. Neither an evaluative nor a collective agency, even when it feels it is being taken, dares ignore evidence.

In the very nature of being—that is, God—it must be hard—and divine history shows how hard—to create that which shall be not himself, yet like himself. The problem is, so far to separate from himself that which must yet on him be ever and always and utterly dependent, that it shall have the existence of an individual, and be able to turn and regard him—choose him, and say, 'I will arise and go to my Father,' and so develop in itself the highest Divine of which it is capable—the will for the good against the evil—the will to be one with the life whence it has come, and in which it still is—the will to close the round of its procession in its return, so working the perfection of reunion—to shape in its own life the ring of eternity—to live immediately, consciously, and active-willingly from its source, from its own very life—to restore to the beginning the end that comes of that beginning—to be the thing the maker thought of when he willed, ere he began to work its being. I imagine the difficulty of doing this thing, of effecting this creation, this separation from himself such that will in the creature shall be possible—I imagine, I say, the difficulty of such creation so great, that for it God must begin inconceivably far back in the infinitesimal regions of beginnings—not to say before anything in the least resembling man, but eternal miles beyond the last farthest-pushed discovery in protoplasm—to set in motion that division from himself which in its grand result should be individuality, consciousness, choice, and conscious choice—choice at last pure, being the choice of the right, the true, the divinely harmonious. Hence the final end of the separation is not individuality; that is but a means to it; the final end is oneness—an impossibility without it. For there can be no unity, no delight of love, no harmony, no good in being, where there is but one. Two at least are needed for oneness; and the greater the number of individuals, the greater, the lovelier, the richer, the diviner is the possible unity.

My head snaps around at the hiss, but it takes awhile to believe he’s real. How could he have gotten here? I take in the claw marks from some wild animal, the back paw he holds slightly above the ground, the prominent bones in his face. He’s come on foot, then, all the way from 13. Maybe they kicked him out or maybe he just couldn’t stand it there without her, so he came looking. “It was the waste of a trip. She’s not here,” I tell him. Buttercup hisses again. “She’s not here. You can hiss all you like. You won’t find Prim.” At her name, he perks up. Raises his flattened ears. Begins to meow hopefully. “Get out!” He dodges the pillow I throw at him. “Go away! There’s nothing left for you here!” I start to shake, furious with him. “She’s not coming back! She’s never ever coming back here again!” I grab another pillow and get to my feet to improve my aim. Out of nowhere, the tears begin to pour down my cheeks. “She’s dead.” I clutch my middle to dull the pain. Sink down on my heels, rocking the pillow, crying. “She’s dead, you stupid cat. She’s dead.” A new sound, part crying, part singing, comes out of my body, giving voice to my despair. Buttercup begins to wail as well. No matter what I do, he won’t go. He circles me, just out of reach, as wave after wave of sobs racks my body, until eventually I fall unconscious. But he must understand. He must know that the unthinkable has happened and to survive will require previously unthinkable acts. Because hours later, when I come to in my bed, he’s there in the moonlight. Crouched beside me, yellow eyes alert, guarding me from the night. In the morning, he sits stoically as I clean the cuts, but digging the thorn from his paw brings on a round of those kitten mews. We both end up crying again, only this time we comfort each other. On the strength of this, I open the letter Haymitch gave me from my mother, dial the phone number, and weep with her as well. Peeta, bearing a warm loaf of bread, shows up with Greasy Sae. She makes us breakfast and I feed all my bacon to Buttercup.

It is a well known fact that warriors and wizards do not get along, because one side considers the other side to be a collection of bloodthirsty idiots who can't walk and think at the same time, while the other side is naturally suspicious of a body of men who mumble a lot and wear long dresses. Oh, say the wizards, if we're going to be like that, then, what about all those studded collars and oiled muscles down at the Young Men's Pagan Association? To which the heroes reply, that's a pretty good allegation coming from a bunch of wimpsoes who won't go near a woman on account, can you believe it, of their mystical power being sort of drained out. Right, say the wizards, that just about does it, you and your leather posing pouches. Oh yeah, say the heroes, why don't you... And so on. This sort of thing has been going on for centuries, and caused a number of major battles which have left large tracts of land uninhabitable because of magical harmonics. In fact, the hero even at this moment galloping towards the Vortex Plains didn't get involved in this kind of argument, because they didn't take it seriously, mainly because this particular hero was a heroine. A redheaded one. Now, there is a tendency at a point like this to look over one's shoulder at the cover artist and start going on at length about leather, thigh-boots and naked blades. Words like "full", "round" and even "pert" creep into the narrative, until the writer has to go and have a cold shower and lie down. Which is all rather silly, because any woman setting out to make a living by the sword isn't about to go around looking like something off the cover of the more advanced kind of lingerie catalogue for the specialised buyer. Oh well, all right. The point that must be made is that although Herrena the Henna-Haired Harridan would look quite stunning after a good bath, a heavy-duty manicure, and the pick of the leather racks in Woo Hun Ling's Oriental Exotica and Martial Aids on Heroes Street, she was currently quite sensibly dressed in light chain mail, soft boots, and a short sword.

Little Nicky heads to the Badlands to see the show for himself. The Western Roads are outside his remit as a U.S. Treasury agent, but he knows the men he wants are its denizens. Standing on the corner of the Great Western and Edinburgh Roads, a sideshow, a carnival of the doped, the beaten, and the crazed. He walks round to the Avenue Haig strip and encounters the playground of Shanghai’s crackpots, cranks, gondoos, and lunatics. He’s accosted constantly: casino touts, hustling pimps, dope dealers; monkeys on chains, dancing dogs, kids turning tumbles, Chinese ‘look see’ boys offering to watch your car. Their numbers rise as the Japs turn the screws on Shanghai ever tighter. Half-crazy American missionaries try to sell him Bibles printed on rice paper—saving souls in the Badlands is one tough beat. The Chinese hawkers do no better with their porno cards of naked dyed blondes, Disney characters in lewd poses, and bare-arsed Chinese girls, all underage. Barkers for the strip shows and porno flicks up the alleyways guarantee genuine French celluloid of the filthiest kind. Beggars abound, near the dealers and bootleggers in the shadows, selling fake heroin pills and bootleg samogon Russian vodka, distilled in alleyways, that just might leave you blind. Off the Avenue Haig, Nicky, making sure of his gun in its shoulder holster, ventures up the side streets and narrow laneways that buzz with the purveyors of cure-all tonics, hawkers of appetite suppressants, male pick-me-ups promising endless virility. Everything is for sale—back-street abortions and unwanted baby girls alongside corn and callus removers, street barbers, and earwax pickers. The stalls of the letter writers for the illiterate are next to the sellers of pills to cure opium addiction. He sees desperate refugees offered spurious Nansen passports, dubious visas for neutral Macao, well-forged letters of transit for Brazil. He could have his fortune told twenty times over (gypsy tarot cards or Chinese bone chuckers? Your choice). He could eat his fill—grilled meat and rice stalls—or he could start a whole new life: end-of-the-worlders and Korean propagandists offer cheap land in Mongolia and Manchukuo.

Almost as though this thought had fluttered through the open window, Vernon Dursley, Harry’s uncle, suddenly spoke. “Glad to see the boy’s stopped trying to butt in. Where is he anyway?” “I don’t know,” said Aunt Petunia unconcernedly. “Not in the house.” Uncle Vernon grunted. “Watching the news . . .” he said scathingly. “I’d like to know what he’s really up to. As if a normal boy cares what’s on the news — Dudley hasn’t got a clue what’s going on, doubt he knows who the Prime Minister is! Anyway, it’s not as if there’d be anything about his lot on our news —” “Vernon, shh!” said Aunt Petunia. “The window’s open!” “Oh — yes — sorry, dear . . .” The Dursleys fell silent. Harry listened to a jingle about Fruit ’N Bran breakfast cereal while he watched Mrs. Figg, a batty, cat-loving old lady from nearby Wisteria Walk, amble slowly past. She was frowning and muttering to herself. Harry was very pleased that he was concealed behind the bush; Mrs. Figg had recently taken to asking him around for tea whenever she met him in the street. She had rounded the corner and vanished from view before Uncle Vernon’s voice floated out of the window again. “Dudders out for tea?” “At the Polkisses’,” said Aunt Petunia fondly. “He’s got so many little friends, he’s so popular . . .” Harry repressed a snort with difficulty. The Dursleys really were astonishingly stupid about their son, Dudley; they had swallowed all his dim-witted lies about having tea with a different member of his gang every night of the summer holidays. Harry knew perfectly well that Dudley had not been to tea anywhere; he and his gang spent every evening vandalizing the play park, smoking on street corners, and throwing stones at passing cars and children. Harry had seen them at it during his evening walks around Little Whinging; he had spent most of the holidays wandering the streets, scavenging newspapers from bins along the way. The opening notes of the music that heralded the seven o’clock news reached Harry’s ears and his stomach turned over. Perhaps tonight — after a month of waiting — would be the night — “Record numbers of stranded holidaymakers fill airports as the Spanish baggage-handlers’ strike reaches its second week —” “Give ’em a lifelong siesta, I would,” snarled Uncle Vernon over the end of the newsreader’s sentence, but no matter: Outside in the flower bed, Harry’s stomach seemed to unclench.

Broaching is a precise machining process in metalworking domain which uses a toothed tool called broach to cut materials into a predetermined shape. Broaching works best for odd shapes where precision machining is needed and hence finds wide application in a number of industry in India and worldwide. Broach resembles a saw to certain extent but unlike a saw, its teeth become larger in size across its length. A broach gives shapes by roughing or removing the material, semi finishing and then by imparting the ultimate finishing. Round or odd shapes, for both internal and external surfaces, can be conveniently formed by broaching. This multi edge tool can shape any metal or metallic alloy but works best on softer materials like plastic, wood, bronze, aluminum, etc. Resharpening of the tool The broach that imparts shape to many work pieces can work properly only when the size and shape of its teeth are perfect. With time and usage, the teeth tend to lose its sharpness and become blunt. Using a dull broach may lead to permanent damage of its teeth. To enhance the broach life and minimize the tooling expense, it needs to be re-sharpened on time. When to opt for resharpening When broaching produce roughly shaped work pieces, it is definitely time for re-sharpening. However, with a little bit of watchfulness, one can even get it sharpened before it delivers poor finish or tearing. Some of the other conditions when this toothed tool will require re-sharpening are: • Excessive hydraulic press pressure required to run the broach • Nicks and scratches on the teeth making it dull • Broach starts drifting • Cutting edges show signs of wear • Chattering occurs while broaching Re-sharpening requires high precision. Removing excessive material from the teeth will adversely affect its longevity. Only proper sharpening will ensure time efficiency and high quality output. Teeth welding, grinding of gullets and teeth crest, reshaping teeth to proper taper are some of the methods used in re-sharpening. Broaching, once used for machining only internal keyways, is now used for machining a plethora of shapes and surfaces for high quantity of work pieces. Broaching requires less tools than most of the other machining process and saves considerable amount of output time and hence favoured for high volume production irrespective of its high cost. In India, broaching finds wide application in the automobile industry. Therefore, a large number of players are foraying into the broach manufacturing industry on a regular basis.

But there were problems. After the movie came out I couldn’t go to a tournament without being surrounded by fans asking for autographs. Instead of focusing on chess positions, I was pulled into the image of myself as a celebrity. Since childhood I had treasured the sublime study of chess, the swim through ever-deepening layers of complexity. I could spend hours at a chessboard and stand up from the experience on fire with insight about chess, basketball, the ocean, psychology, love, art. The game was exhilarating and also spiritually calming. It centered me. Chess was my friend. Then, suddenly, the game became alien and disquieting. I recall one tournament in Las Vegas: I was a young International Master in a field of a thousand competitors including twenty-six strong Grandmasters from around the world. As an up-and-coming player, I had huge respect for the great sages around me. I had studied their masterpieces for hundreds of hours and was awed by the artistry of these men. Before first-round play began I was seated at my board, deep in thought about my opening preparation, when the public address system announced that the subject of Searching for Bobby Fischer was at the event. A tournament director placed a poster of the movie next to my table, and immediately a sea of fans surged around the ropes separating the top boards from the audience. As the games progressed, when I rose to clear my mind young girls gave me their phone numbers and asked me to autograph their stomachs or legs. This might sound like a dream for a seventeen-year-old boy, and I won’t deny enjoying the attention, but professionally it was a nightmare. My game began to unravel. I caught myself thinking about how I looked thinking instead of losing myself in thought. The Grandmasters, my elders, were ignored and scowled at me. Some of them treated me like a pariah. I had won eight national championships and had more fans, public support and recognition than I could dream of, but none of this was helping my search for excellence, let alone for happiness. At a young age I came to know that there is something profoundly hollow about the nature of fame. I had spent my life devoted to artistic growth and was used to the sweaty-palmed sense of contentment one gets after many hours of intense reflection. This peaceful feeling had nothing to do with external adulation, and I yearned for a return to that innocent, fertile time. I missed just being a student of the game, but there was no escaping the spotlight. I found myself dreading chess, miserable before leaving for tournaments. I played without inspiration and was invited to appear on television shows. I smiled.

(The seige of Alma's castle) For all so soone, as Guyon thence was gon Vpon his voyage with his trustie guide, That wicked band of villeins fresh begon That castle to assaile on euery side, And lay strong siege about it far and wide. So huge and infinite their numbers were, That all the land they vnder them did hide; So fowle and vgly, that exceeding feare Their visages imprest, when they approched neare. Them in twelue troupes their Captain did dispart And round about in fittest steades did place, Where each might best offend his proper part, And his contrary obiect most deface, As euery one seem’d meetest in that cace. Seuen of the same against the Castle gate, In strong entrenchments he did closely place, Which with incessaunt force and endlesse hate, They battred day and night, and entraunce did awate. The first troupe was a monstrous rablement Of fowle misshapen wights, of which some were Headed like Owles, with beckes vncomely bent, Others like Dogs, others like Gryphons dreare, And some had wings, and some had clawes to teare, And euery one of them had Lynces eyes, And euery one did bow and arrowes beare: All those were lawlesse lustes, corrupt enuies, And couetous aspectes, all cruell enimies. Those same against the bulwarke of the Sight Did lay strong siege, and battailous assault,... The second Bulwarke was the Hearing sence, Gainst which the second troupe dessignment makes; Deformed creatures, in straunge difference, Some hauing heads like Harts, some like to Snakes, Some like wild Bores late rouzd out of the brakes; Slaunderous reproches, and fowle infamies, Leasings, backbytings, and vaine-glorious crakes, Bad counsels, prayses, and false flatteries. All those against that fort did bend their batteries. Likewise that same third Fort, that is the Smell Of that third troupe was cruelly assayd: Whose hideous shapes were like to feends of hell, Some like to hounds, some like to Apes, dismayd, Some like to Puttockes, all in plumes arayd: All shap’t according their conditions, For by those vgly formes weren pourtrayd, Foolish delights and fond abusions, Which do that sence besiege with light illusions. And that fourth band, which cruell battry bent, Against the fourth Bulwarke, that is the Tost, Was as the rest, a grysie rablement, Some mouth’d like greedy Oystriges, some fast Like loathly Toades, some fashioned in the wast Like swine; for so deformd is luxury, Surfeat, misdiet, and vnthriftie wast, Vaine feasts, and idle superfluity: All those this sences Fort assayle incessantly. But the fift troupe most horrible of hew, And fierce of force, was dreadfull to report: For some like Snailes, some did like spyders shew, And some like vgly Vrchins thicke and short: Cruelly they assayled that fift Fort, Armed with darts of sensuall delight, With stings of carnall lust, and strong effort Of feeling pleasures, with which day and night Against that same fift bulwarke they continued fight.

A few years ago, a couple of young men from my church came to our home for dinner. During the course of the dinner, the conversation turned from religion to various world mythologies and we began to play the game of ‘Name That Character.” To play this game, you pick a category such as famous actors, superheroes or historical characters. In turn, each person describes events in a famous character’s life while everyone else tries to guess who the character is. Strategically you try to describe the deeds of a character in such a way that it might fit any number of characters in that category. After three guesses, if no one knows who your character is, then you win. Choosing the category of Bible Characters, we played a couple of fairly easy rounds with the typical figures, then it was my turn. Now, knowing these well meaning young men had very little religious experience or understanding outside of their own religion, I posed a trick question. I said, “Now my character may seem obvious, but please wait until the end of my description to answer.” I took a long breath for dramatic effect, and began, “My character was the son of the King of Heaven and a mortal woman.” Immediately both young men smiled knowingly, but I raised a finger asking them to wait to give their responses. I continued, “While he was just a baby, a jealous rival attempted to kill him and he was forced into hiding for several years. As he grew older, he developed amazing powers. Among these were the ability to turn water into wine and to control the mental health of other people. He became a great leader and inspired an entire religious movement. Eventually he ascended into heaven and sat with his father as a ruler in heaven.” Certain they knew who I was describing, my two guests were eager to give the winning answer. However, I held them off and continued, “Now I know adding these last parts will seem like overkill, but I simply cannot describe this character without mentioning them. This person’s birthday is celebrated on December 25th and he is worshipped in a spring festival. He defied death, journeyed to the underworld to raise his loved ones from the dead and was resurrected. He was granted immortality by his Father, the king of the gods, and was worshipped as a savior god by entire cultures.” The two young men were practically climbing out of their seats, their faces beaming with the kind of smile only supreme confidence can produce. Deciding to end the charade I said, “I think we all know the answer, but to make it fair, on the count of three just yell out the answer. One. Two. Three.” “Jesus Christ” they both exclaimed in unison – was that your answer as well? Both young men sat back completely satisfied with their answer, confident it was the right one…, but I remained silent. Five seconds ticked away without a response, then ten. The confidence of my two young friends clearly began to drain away. It was about this time that my wife began to shake her head and smile to herself. Finally, one of them asked, “It is Jesus Christ, right? It has to be!” Shaking my head, I said, “Actually, I was describing the Greek god Dionysus.

The panel delivery truck drew up before the front of the “Amsterdam Apartments” on 126th Street between Madison and Fifth Avenues. Words on its sides, barely discernible in the dim street light, read: LUNATIC LYNDON … I DELIVER AND INSTALL TELEVISION SETS ANY TIME OF DAY OR NIGHT ANY PLACE. Two uniformed delivery men alighted and stood on the sidewalk to examine an address book in the light of a torch. Dark faces were highlighted for a moment like masks on display and went out with the light. They looked up and down the street. No one was in sight. Houses were vague geometrical patterns of black against the lighter blackness of the sky. Crosstown streets were always dark. Above them, in the black squares of windows, crescent-shaped whites of eyes and quarter moons of yellow teeth bloomed like Halloween pumpkins. Suddenly voices bubbled in the night. “Lookin’ for somebody?” The driver looked up. “Amsterdam Apartments.” “These is they.” Without replying, the driver and his helper began unloading a wooden box. Stenciled on its side were the words: Acme Television “Satellite” A.406. “What that number?” someone asked. “Fo-o-six,” Sharp-eyes replied. “I’m gonna play it in the night house if I ain’t too late.” “What ya’ll got there, baby?” “Television set,” the driver replied shortly. “Who dat getting a television this time of night?” The delivery man didn’t reply. A man’s voice ventured, “Maybe it’s that bird liver on the third storey got all them mens.” A woman said scornfully, “Bird liver! If she bird liver I’se fish and eggs and I got a daughter old enough to has mens.” “… or not!” a male voice boomed. “What she got ’ill get television sets when you jealous old hags is fighting over mops and pails.” “Listen to the loverboy! When yo’ love come down last?” “Bet loverboy ain’t got none, bird liver or what.” “Ain’t gonna get none either. She don’t burn no coal.” “Not in dis life, next life maybe.” “You people make me sick,” a woman said from a group on the sidewalk that had just arrived. “We looking for the dead man and you talking ’bout tricks.” The two delivery men were silently struggling with the big television box but the new arrivals got in their way. “Will you ladies kindly move your asses and look for dead men sommers else,” the driver said. His voice sounded mean. “ ’Scuse me,” the lady said. “You ain’t got him, is you?” “Does I look like I’m carrying a dead man ’round in my pocket?” “Dead man! What dead man? What you folks playing?” a man called down interestedly. “Skin?” “Georgia skin? Where?” “Ain’t nobody playing no skin,” the lady said with disgust. “He’s one of us.” “Who?” “The dead man, that’s who.” “One of usses? Where he at?” “Where he at? He dead, that’s where he at.” “Let me get some green down on dead man’s row.” “Ain’t you the mother’s gonna play fo-o-six?” “Thass all you niggers thinks about,” the disgusted lady said. “Womens and hits!” “What else is they?” “Where yo’ pride? The white cops done killed one of usses and thass all you can think about.” “Killed ’im where?” “We don’t know where. Why you think we’s looking?” “You sho’ is a one-tracked woman. I help you look, just don’t call me nigger is all.

There is an art to the business of making sandwiches which it is given to few ever to find the time to explore in depth. It is a simple task, but the opportunities for satisfaction are many and profound: choosing the right bread for instance. The Sandwich Maker had spent many months in daily consultation and experiment with Grarp the baker and eventually they had between them created a loaf of exactly the consistency that was dense enough to slice thinly and neatly, while still being light, moist and having that fine nutty flavour which best enhanced the savour of roast Perfectly Normal Beast flesh. There was also the geometry of the slice to be refined: the precise relationships between the width and height of the slice and also its thickness which would give the proper sense of bulk and weight to the finished sandwich: here again, lightness was a virtue, but so too were firmness, generosity and that promise of succulence and savour that is the hallmark of a truly intense sandwich experience. The proper tools, of course, were crucial, and many were the days that the Sandwich Maker, when not engaged with the Baker at his oven, would spend with Strinder the Tool Maker, weighing and balancing knives, taking them to the forge and back again. Suppleness, strength, keenness of edge, length and balance were all enthusiastically debated, theories put forward, tested, refined, and many was the evening when the Sandwich Maker and the Tool Maker could be seen silhouetted against the light of the setting sun and the Tool Maker’s forge making slow sweeping movements through the air trying one knife after another, comparing the weight of this one with the balance of another, the suppleness of a third and the handle binding of a fourth. Three knives altogether were required. First there was the knife for the slicing of the bread: a firm, authoritative blade which imposed a clear and defining will on a loaf. Then there was the butter-spreading knife, which was a whippy little number but still with a firm backbone to it. Early versions had been a little too whippy, but now the combination of flexibility with a core of strength was exactly right to achieve the maximum smoothness and grace of spread. The chief amongst the knives, of course, was the carving knife. This was the knife that would not merely impose its will on the medium through which it moved, as did the bread knife; it must work with it, be guided by the grain of the meat, to achieve slices of the most exquisite consistency and translucency, that would slide away in filmy folds from the main hunk of meat. The Sandwich Maker would then flip each sheet with a smooth flick of the wrist on to the beautifully proportioned lower bread slice, trim it with four deft strokes and then at last perform the magic that the children of the village so longed to gather round and watch with rapt attention and wonder. With just four more dexterous flips of the knife he would assemble the trimmings into a perfectly fitting jigsaw of pieces on top of the primary slice. For every sandwich the size and shape of the trimmings were different, but the Sandwich Maker would always effortlessly and without hesitation assemble them into a pattern which fitted perfectly. A second layer of meat and a second layer of trimmings, and the main act of creation would be accomplished.

In Vietnam, lying became so much part of the system that sometimes not lying seemed immoral...The teenage adrenaline-drained patrol leader has to call in the score so analysts, newspaper reporters, and politicians back in Washington have something to do. Never mind that Smithers and his squad may have stopped a developing attack planned to hit the company that night, saving scores of lives and maintaining control over a piece of ground. All they'll be judged on, and all their superiors have to be judged on, is the kill ratio. Smithers's best friend has just been killed. Two other friends are missing pieces of their bodies and are going into shock. No one in the squad knows if the enemy is 15 meters away waiting to open up again or running. Smithers is tired and has a lot of other things on his mind. With scorekeepers often 25 kilometers away, no one is going to check on the score. In short, Smithers has a great incentive to lie. He also has a great need to lie. His best friend is dead. "Why?" he asks himself. This is where the lying in Vietnam all began. It had to fill the long silence following Smithers's anguished "Why?" So it starts. "Nelson, how many did you get?" Smithers asks. PFC Nelson looks up from crying over the body of his friend Katz and says, "How the fuck do I know?" His friend Smithers says, "Well, did you get that bastard that came around the dogleg after Katz threw the Mike-26?" Nelson looks down at Katz's face, hardening and turning yellow like tallow. "You're goddamn right I got him," he almost whispers. It's all he can offer his dead friend. "There's no body." "They drug the fucker away. I tell you I got him!" Nelson is no longer whispering. … The patrol leader doesn't have a body, but what are the odds that he's going to call his friend a liar or, even more difficult, make Katz's death meaningless, given that the only meaning now lies in this one statistic? No one is congratulating him for exposing the enemy, keeping them screened from the main body, which is the purpose of security patrols. He calls in one confirmed kill. ... Just then PFC Schroeder comes crawling over with Kool-Aid stains all around his mouth and says, "I think I got one, right by the dogleg of the trail after Katz threw the grenade." "Yeah, we called that one in." "No, it ain't the one Nelson got. I tell you I got another one." Smithers thinks it was the same one but he's not about to have PFC Schroeder feeling bad, particularly after they've all seen their squad mate die. … the last thing on Smithers's mind is the integrity of meaningless numbers. The message gets relayed to the battalion commander. He's just taken two wounded and one dead. All he has to report is one confirmed, one probable. This won't look good. Bad ratio. He knows all sorts of bullets were flying all over the place. It was a point-to-point contact, so no ambush, so the stinkin' thinking' goes round and round, so the probable had to be a kill. But really if we got two confirmed kills, there was probably a probable. I mean, what's the definition of probable if it isn't probable to get one? What the hell, two kills, two probables. Our side is now ahead. Victory is just around the corner. … [then the artillery has to claim their own additional kills…] By the time all this shit piles up at the briefing in Saigon, we've won the war.

Wherever you go, Provincetown will always take you back, at whatever age and in whatever condition. Because time moves somewhat differently there, it is possible to return after ten years or more and run into an acquaintance, on Commercial or at the A&P, who will ask mildly, as if he’d seen you the day before yesterday, what you’ve been doing with yourself. The streets of Provincetown are not in any way threatening, at least not to those with an appetite for the full range of human passions. If you grow deaf and blind and lame in Provincetown, some younger person with a civic conscience will wheel you wherever you need to go; if you die there, the marshes and dunes are ready to receive your ashes. While you’re alive and healthy, for as long as it lasts, the golden hands of the clock tower at Town Hall will note each hour with an electric bell as we below, on our purchase of land, buy or sell, paint or write or fish for bass, or trade gossip on the post office steps. The old bayfront houses will go on dreaming, at least until the emptiness between their boards proves more durable than the boards themselves. The sands will continue their slow devouring of the forests that were the Pilgrims’ first sight of North America, where man, as Fitzgerald put it, “must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.” The ghost of Dorothy Bradford will walk the ocean floor off Herring Cove, draped in seaweed, surrounded by the fleeting silver lights of fish, and the ghost of Guglielmo Marconi will tap out his messages to those even longer dead than he. The whales will breach and loll in their offshore world, dive deep into black canyons, and swim south when the time comes. Herons will browse the tidal pools; crabs with blue claws tipped in scarlet will scramble sideways over their own shadows. At sunset the dunes will take on their pink-orange light, and just after sunset the boats will go luminous in the harbor. Ashes of the dead, bits of their bones, will mingle with the sand in the salt marsh, and wind and water will further disperse the scraps of wood, shell, and rope I’ve used for Billy’s various memorials. After dark the raccoons and opossums will start on their rounds; the skunks will rouse from their burrows and head into town. In summer music will rise up. The old man with the portable organ will play for passing change in front of the public library. People in finery will sing the anthems of vanished goddesses; people who are still trying to live by fishing will pump quarters into jukeboxes that play the songs of their high school days. As night progresses, people in diminishing numbers will wander the streets (where whaling captains and their wives once promenaded, where O’Neill strode in drunken furies, where Radio Girl—who knows where she is now?—announced the news), hoping for surprises or just hoping for what the night can be counted on to provide, always, in any weather: the smell of water and its sound; the little houses standing square against immensities of ocean and sky; and the shapes of gulls gliding overhead, white as bone china, searching from their high silence for whatever they might be able to eat down there among the dunes and marshes, the black rooftops, the little lights tossing on the water as the tides move out or in.

THE DIET-GO-ROUND LOW-CALORIE DIETS Diets began by limiting the number of calories consumed in a day. But restricting calories depleted energy, so people craved high-calorie fat and sugar as energizing emergency fuel. LOW-FAT DIETS High-calorie fats were targeted. Restricting fat left people hungry, however, and they again craved more fats and sugars. FAKE FAT Synthetic low-cal fats were invented. People could now replace butter with margarine, but without calories it didn’t deliver the energy and satisfaction people needed. They still craved real fat and sugar. THE DIET GO-ROUND GRAPEFRUIT DIETS Banking on the antioxidant and fat-emulsifying properties of grapefruit, dieters could eat real fat again, as long as they ate a grapefruit first. But even grapefruits were no match for the high-fat American diet. SUGAR BLUES The more America restricted fat in any way to lose weight, the more the body rebounded by storing fat, and craving and bingeing on fats and sugars. Sugar was now to blame! SUGAR FREE High-calorie sugars were replaced with no-calorie synthetic sweeteners. The mind was happy but the body was starving as diet drinks replaced meals. People eventually binged on excess calories from other sources, such as protein. HIGH-PROTEIN DIETS The new diet let people eat all the protein they wanted without noticing the restriction of carbs and sugar. Energy came from fat stores and dieters lost weight. But without carbs, they soon experienced low energy and craved and binged on carbs. HIGH-CARB DIETS Carb-craving America was ripe for high-carb diets. You could now lose weight and eat up to 80 percent carbs—but they had to be slow-burning, complex carbs. Fast-paced America was addicted to fast energy, however, and high-carb diets soon became high-sugar diets. LOW CHOLESTEROL The combination of sugar, fat, and stress raised cholesterol to dangerous levels. The solution: Reemphasize complex carbs and reduce all animal fats. Once again, dieters felt restricted and began craving and bingeing on fats and sugars. EXERCISE Diets weren’t working, so exercise became the cholesterol cure-all. It worked for a time, but people didn’t like to “work out.” Within 25 years, no more than 20 percent of Americans would do it regularly. VEGETARIANISM With heart disease and cancers on the rise, red meat was targeted. Vegetarianism came into fashion but was rarely followed correctly. People lived on pasta and bread, and blood sugars and energy levels went out of control. GRAZING High-carb diets were causing energy and blood sugar problems. If you ate every 2 hours, energy was propped up and fast-paced America could keep speeding. Fatigue became chronic fatigue, however, with depression and anxiety to follow. FOOD COMBINING By eating fats, proteins, and carbs separately, digestion improved and a host of digestive, energy, and weight problems were helped temporarily. But the rules for what you could eat together led to more frequent small meals. People eventually slipped back to their old ways and old problems. THE ZONE Aimed at fixing blood sugar levels, this diet balanced intake of proteins, fats, and carbs. It worked, but again restricted certain kinds of carbs, so it didn’t last, and America was again craving emergency fuel. COFFEE TO THE RESCUE Exhausted and with a million things to do, America turned to legal stimulants like coffee for energy. But borrowed energy must be paid back, and many are still living in debt. FULL CIRCLE Frustrated, America is turning to new crash diets and a wave of high-protein diets. It is time to break this man-made cycle with the simplicity of nature’s own 3-Season Diet. If you let nature feed you, you will not starve or crave anything.

Elvis was pretty slick. Nonetheless, I knew that he was cheating. His four-of-a-kind would beat my full house. I had two choices. I could fold my hand and lose all the money I’d contributed to the pot, or I could match Elvis’s bet and continue to play. If a gambler thought he was in an honest game, he would probably match the bet thinking his full house was a sure winner. The con artist would bet large amounts of money on the remaining cards, knowing he had a winning hand. I narrowed my eyes and pursed my lips, as if struggling to decide whether to wager five hundred pesos or fold my hand and call it quits. I knew there were five men between me and the door and watched them from the corner of my eye. Even if I folded and accepted my losses, I knew they would not let me leave without taking all my cash. They had strength in numbers and would strong arm me if they could. The men stared, intently watching my next move. I set down my beer and took five one hundred peso notes from my wallet. The men at the bar relaxed. My adrenaline surged, pumping through my brain, sharpening my focus as I prepared for action. I moved as if to place my bet on the table, but instead my hand bumped my beer bottle, spilling it onto Elvis’ lap. Elvis reacted instinctively to the cold beer, pushing back from the table and rising to his feet. I jumped up from my chair making a loud show of apologizing, and in the ensuing pandemonium I snatched all the money off the table and bolted for the door! My tactics took everyone by complete surprise. I had a small head start, but the Filipinos recovered quickly and scrambled to cut off my escape. I dashed to the door and barely made it to the exit ahead of the Filipinos. The thugs were nearly upon me when I suddenly wheeled round and kicked the nearest man square in the chest. My kick cracked ribs and launched the shocked Filipino through the air into the other men, tumbling them to the ground. For the moment, my assailants were a jumble of tangled bodies on the floor. I darted out the door and raced down the busy sidewalk, dodging pedestrians. I looked back and saw the furious Filipinos swarming out of the bar. Running full tilt, I grabbed onto the rail of a passing Jeepney and swung myself into the vehicle. The wide-eyed passengers shrunk back, trying to keep their distance from the crazy American. I yelled to the driver, “Step on the gas!” and thrust a hundred peso note into his hand. I looked back and saw all six of Johnny’s henchmen piling onto one tricycle. The jeepney driver realized we were being pursued and stomped the gas pedal to the floor. The jeepney surged into traffic and accelerated away from the tricycle. The tricycle was only designed for one driver and two passengers. With six bodies hanging on, the overloaded motorcycle was slow and unstable. The motorcycle driver held the throttle wide open and the tricycle rocked side to side, almost tipping over, as the frustrated riders yelled curses and flailed their arms futilely. My jeepney continued to speed through the city, pulling away from our pursuers. Finally, I could no longer see the tricycle behind us. When I was sure I had escaped, I thanked the driver and got off at the next stop. I hired a tricycle of my own and carefully made my way back to my neighborhood, keeping careful watch for Johnny and his friends. I knew that Johnny was in a frustrated rage. Not only had I foiled his plans, I had also made off with a thousand pesos of his cash. Even though I had great fun and came out of my escapade in good shape, my escape was risky and could’ve had a very different outcome. I feel a disclaimer is appropriate for those people who think it is fun to con street hustlers, “Kids. Don’t try this at home.

A man can survive ten years--but twenty-five, who can get through alive? Shukhov rather enjoyed having everybody poke a finger at him as if to say: Look at him, his term's nearly up. But he had his doubts about it. Those zeks who finished their time during the war had all been "retained pending special instructions" and had been released only in '46. Even those serving three-year sentences were kept for another five. The law can be stood on its head. When your ten years are up they can say, "Here's another ten for you." Or exile you. Yet there were times when you thought about it and you almost choked with excitement. Yes, your term really _is_ coming to an end; the spool is unwinding. . . . Good God! To step out to freedom, just walk out on your own two feet. But it wasn't right for an old-timer to talk about it aloud, and Shukhov said to Kilgas: "Don't you worry about those twenty-five years of yours. It's not a fact you'll be in all that time. But that I've been in eight full years--now that is a fact." Yes, you live with your feet in the mud and there's no time to be thinking about how you got in or how you're going to get out. According to his dossier, Ivan Denisovich Shukhov had been sentenced for high treason. He had testified to it himself. Yes, he'd surrendered to the Germans with the intention of betraying his country and he'd returned from captivity to carry out a mission for German intelligence. What sort of mission neither Shukhov nor the interrogator could say. So it had been left at that- -a mission. Shukhov had figured it all out. If he didn't sign he'd be shot If he signed he'd still get a chance to live. So he signed. But what really happened was this. In February 1942 their whole army was surrounded on the northwest front No food was parachuted to them. There were no planes. Things got so bad that they were scraping the hooves of dead horses--the horn could be soaked In water and eaten. Their ammunition was gone. So the Germans rounded them up in the forest, a few at a time. Shukhov was In one of these groups, and remained in German captivity for a day or two. Then five of them managed to escape. They stole through the forest and marshes again, and, by a miracle, reached their own lines. A machine gunner shot two of them on the spot, a third died of his wounds, but two got through. Had they been wiser they'd have said they'd been wandering in the forest, and then nothing would have happened. But they told the truth: they said they were escaped POW's. POW's, you fuckers! If all five of them had got through, their statements could have been found to tally and they might have been believed. But with two it was hopeless. You've put your damned heads together and cooked up that escape story, they were told. Deaf though he was, Senka caught on that they were talking about escaping from the Germans, and said in a loud voice: "Three times I escaped, and three times they caught me." Senka, who had suffered so much, was usually silent: he didn't hear what people said and didn't mix in their conversation. Little was known about him--only that he'd been in Buchenwald, where he'd worked with the underground and smuggled in arms for the mutiny; and how the Germans had punished him by tying his wrists behind his back, hanging him up by them, and whipping him. "You've been In for eight years, Vanya," Kilgas argued. "But what camps? Not 'specials.' You bad breads to sleep with. You didn't wear numbers. But try and spend eight years in a 'special'--doing hard labor. No one's come out of a 'special' alive." "Broads! Boards you mean, not broads." Shukhov stared at the coals in the stove and remeinbered his seven years in the North. And how he worked for three years hauling logs--for packing cases and railroad ties. The flames in the campfires had danced up there, too--at timber-felling during the night. Their chief made it a rule that any squad that had failed to meet its quota had to stay In the forest after dark.

I discovered something else, and that is that suckers differ among themselves according to the degree of experience. The tyro knows nothing, and everybody, including himself, knows it. But the next, or second, grade thinks he knows a great deal and makes others feel that way too. He is the experienced sucker, who has studied not the market itself but a few remarks about the market made by a still higher grade of suckers. The second-grade sucker knows how to keep from losing his money in some of the ways that get the raw beginner. It is this semisucker rather than the 100 per cent article who is the real all-the-year-round support of the commission houses. He lasts about three and a half years on an average, as compared with a single season of from three to thirty weeks, which is the usual Wall Street life of a first offender. It is naturally the semisucker who is always quoting the famous trading aphorisms and the various rules of the game. He knows all the don'ts that ever fell from the oracular lips of the old stagers excepting the principal one, which is: Don't be a sucker! This semisucker is the type that thinks he has cut his wisdom teeth because he loves to buy on declines. He waits for them. He measures his bargains by the number of points it has sold off from the top. In big bull markets the plain unadulterated sucker, utterly ignorant of rules and precedents, buys blindly because he hopes blindly. He makes most of the money until one of the healthy reactions takes it away from him at one fell swoop. But the Careful Mike sucker does what I did when I thought I was playing the game intelligently according to the intelligence of others. I knew I needed to change my bucket-shop methods and I thought I was solving my problem with any change, particularly one that assayed high gold values according to the experienced traders among the customers.

No matter what anyone in North Star thought of my mom, everyone agreed on one thing: she was the best cook in the Texas Hill Country. She was known for her barbecue and fried pies. But she was most famous for one particular dish. The dish people people would drive hundreds of miles for was simply called the Number One. I imagine Momma was going to make a list of specials. The trouble was, she never got past the Number One. So there it sat at the top of the menu, alone, all by itself. The Number One: Chicken fried steak with cream gravy, mashed potatoes, green beans cooked in bacon fat, one buttermilk biscuit, and a slice of pecan pie With Brad's words ringing in my head about my vague culinary vision, I decide to make the Number One for tonight's supper. After leaving the salon, I drive to various farm stands, grocery stores, and butchers. I handpick the top-round steak with care, choose fresh eggs one by one, and feel an immense sense of home as I pull Mom's cast-iron skillet from the depths of Merry Carole's cabinets. My happiest memories involve me walking into whatever house we were staying in at the time to the sounds and smells of chicken fried steak sizzling away in that skillet. This dish is at the very epicenter of who I am. If my culinary roots start anywhere, it's with the Number One. As I tenderize the beef, my mind is clear and I'm happy. I haven't cooked like this- my recipes for me and the people I love- in far too long. If ever. Time flies as I roll out the crust for the pecan pie. I'm happy and contented as I cut out the biscuit rounds one by one. I haven't a care in the world. Being in Merry Carole's kitchen has washed away everything I left in the whirlwind of being back in North Star.

But sorry is the heart that knows what’s round the bend. — D.A. Powell, from “The Bathers,” Project Muse Volume 38, Number 1, Spring 2012

Most of the salt occurred in the sediments on the swamp bottoms. To make the water potable, the Maya laid a layer of crushed limestone atop the sediments, effectively paving over the salt. As the researchers noted, the work had to be done before the Maya could move in and set up their milpas and gardens. “Permanent, year-round populations could be established only in the presence of an anticipatory engineering of water supplies.” The Maya heartland, in other words, was a network of artificially habitable terrestrial islands. As Maya numbers grew, so did the islands beneath them.

I haven’t been drained that low in a long time. I shouldn’t have tried to take so much all at once,” I muttered, wanting to apologise but not quite finding the right words beyond that statement. “Well feel free to just steal all of mine then,” Darcy spat icily, clutching her neck tighter. I had the urge to heal her, but knew if I tried to touch her again, she’d only recoil. The ambulance pulled away and I glanced around, double checking Darius wasn’t here and I was glad to find he’d listened to me for once. That was something anyway. “Come on, I can drive you girls back in my car,” I offered. I’d left my Faerrari parked at the Acrux Hotel when I’d last visited Tucana, opting to stardust home because I’d been too drunk to drive. But I hadn’t had any magical drinks tonight, so I’d healed myself of the effects of the whiskey I’d consumed before coming to get Darius from the nightclub. Tory’s lip curled back as she glared at me with poison in her gaze. “We’re not going anywhere alone with you,” Darcy said bitterly, distrust in her eyes. “Don’t be ridiculous,” I snapped, stepping forward to get hold of her. I’d protect her tonight whether she liked it or not. Tory moved to intercept me and Caleb joined her too like a prime asshole. “You don’t fucking touch her again,” Tory growled. I narrowed my eyes at her, about to object, but as my gaze slid to Darcy over her shoulder and I saw the wall in her eyes that told me to get fucked, I knew I wasn’t going to win this fight. “Bastard,” Darcy hissed at me, looking woozy. Shit, I needed to heal her. And I could get her a blood replenishing potion back at the academy. “Come on, girls. The bus is gonna leave soon,” Caleb said, tugging Tory after him but she dug her heels in, waiting for Darcy. I opened my mouth to try and find the words that would convince Blue to stay with me, but she walked straight past me with her cheek turned and Tory threw me one more filthy look before they all headed down the street to the bus stop where mountains of students were gathering. Professors were among them and I knew they were safe enough in numbers, but my feet were still rooted to the pavement as I watched Darcy leave. You drank way too much. You have to get a grip. How are you going to keep feeding from her if you act like a monster every time your teeth are in her? I’d never had this problem before. The only thing I could compare it to was when my magic had been Awakened and my Order had Emerged. That first feed had made me feel like a ravenous beast with a bottomless stomach, and yet it still didn’t have a pinch on what it was like to feed from Blue. Caleb led Tory and Darcy past the queue straight onto the bus and my hackles rose as they joined Max and Seth on the back seats. And as Seth pulled Darcy close to him and nuzzled against her cheek, that feral animal in me awoke once more. I took out my Atlas and shot an update to Francesca, anxiously scoring my fingers through my hair. Just as the bus pulled away and rounded a corner, the FIB appeared on the street and I was immediately surrounded by three agents with dark frowns on their faces. “Lance Orion, you need to come down to the station and make a statement,” Captain Hoskins said and I sighed, knowing it was going to be a long ass night. I agreed and as I was stardusted away to the precinct, my heart was tugged in another direction, nearly forcing the stars to guide me elsewhere. But the captain ensured I made it to where he wanted to take me and I made a silent prayer to the stars that Darcy wouldn’t end up in Seth Capella’s bed tonight. Because I wasn’t sure I could control the demon in me who’d want his head for that. (ORION POV)

This is called the plurality voting system (‘plurality’ meaning ‘largest number of votes’) – often called the ‘first-past-the-post’ system, because there is no prize for any runner-up, and no second round of voting (both of which feature in other electoral systems for the sake of increasing the proportionality of the outcomes). Plurality voting typically ‘over-represents’ the two largest parties, compared with the proportion of votes they receive. Moreover, it is not guaranteed to avoid the population paradox, and is even capable of bringing one party to power when another has received far more votes in total. These features are often cited as arguments against plurality voting and in favour of a more proportional system – either literal proportional representation or other schemes such as transferable-vote systems and run-off systems which have the effect of making the representation of voters in the legislature more proportional. However, under Popper’s criterion, that is all insignificant in comparison with the greater effectiveness of plurality voting at removing bad governments and policies.

Time credits can be complicated since they aren’t guaranteed and can be awarded or denied seemingly at the whim of corrections officers and circumstances beyond any rational control or prediction. However, there has been a long-standing pattern in Illinois of people sentenced to a year in prison actually serving only sixty-one days. To explain this, there was a rumor about obscure accounting bureaucracy. Apparently, state government budgetary months were rounded to thirty days. Once a prisoner was in for any amount of time longer than two months, the Illinois Department of Corrections (or maybe the specific institution) was eligible to, and in fact did, receive funds from the State to feed and house that person for a whole year. Therefore, the hustle by IDOC was to get as many nonviolent inmates as possible who were sentenced to one-year terms (primarily low-level drug possession convicts), kick them out on the sixty-first day, and take the money and run. It was so common that defense attorneys, prosecutors, and judges all over the state routinely stretched ethical boundaries to dangle that number to defendants as a plea incentive.

On the eve of the hearing, in the fall of 2017, reporters reviewed the prepared testimony of Facebook legal counsel Colin Stretch and his counterparts at Twitter and Google. Twitter had acknowledged finding 131,000 Russian tweets. Google had disclosed that “more than 1,000” Russian videos had been uploaded. For its part, Facebook was coming to the table with a number in the nine figures. The comparison wasn’t apples to oranges so much as an apple to a school bus. As a portion of the trillions of total content views over the course of the 2016 election, it was trivial—a rounding error—but it sure sounded like a lot: “Russian Influence Reached 126 Million Through Facebook Alone,” a New York Times headline blared. —

It wasn’t even about the wonky kitchen cabinet doors or the number of times over the years she’d asked him to paint the kitchen or fix the broken step on the stairs. It wasn’t about mowing the lawn every Saturday morning or the fact that they’d never gotten round to laying the patio, even though the bricks had been lined up at the side of the house for over a decade.

Sadly, I worshipped my childhood, I was fragile and all-powerful at the same time. I had the right to rule in a world created for my pleasure, which was enough for me. What was real interested me not at all for it did not burden me. I had the time to watch the most unenterprising insect, to make a beetle go round and round, to make a string of ants climb up a stem, I had time to count my steps, and to count the numbers of stamens in the heart of a daisy. I knew all about dates, odors, shapes.

One of the case studies in the above-referenced “Representations of Colonialism” is the popular 2002 strategy game Puerto Rico, in which players take on the role of Spaniards newly arrived on the island of—you guessed it—Puerto Rico, all seeking to create plantations and extract as much indigo, sugar, tobacco and coffee as possible to ship back to the European homeland. To get ahead, the authors note, each player “needs a number of the small black discs that come into the game each round. In the game rules, these are referred to as ‘colonists,’ but in practice and from the historical background, it is clear that these discs represent slaves. In addition, there are no mechanisms in the game for slowing down growth or penalties for extracting resources too quickly or using ‘colonists’ too intensively. There are numerous exchanges in various discussion forums pointing out how politically incorrect the game is, and some players feel uncomfortable with the game for this reason.” Nevertheless, the game is ranked in the top fifteen worldwide.

There are about forty-eight hurricanes each year across the globe. Two-thirds of them are in the Northern Hemisphere (where hurricane season is June though November) and one-third is in the South (where the season is November through May). In round numbers, about 60 percent are in the Pacific, 30 percent in the Indian Ocean, and 10 percent in the North Atlantic; they are very rare in the South Atlantic.