Sixty Nine Quotes

What the hell, man?” Dawson exploded, hands flying up. “I was on level sixty-nine of Candy Crush, you bastard. Do you know how hard that—?

The Quiet World In an effort to get people to look into each other’s eyes more, and also to appease the mutes, the government has decided to allot each person exactly one hundred and sixty-seven words, per day. When the phone rings, I put it to my ear without saying hello. In the restaurant I point at chicken noodle soup. I am adjusting well to the new way. Late at night, I call my long distance lover, proudly say I only used fifty-nine today. I saved the rest for you. When she doesn’t respond, I know she’s used up all her words, so I slowly whisper I love you thirty-two and a third times. After that, we just sit on the line and listen to each other breathe.

I’m a professional bodyguard. (Leta) Yeah, right. (Aiden) Nope. All true. I know seventy-two ways to kill a man and sixty-nine of them look like an accident. (Leta)

A sixty - eight, he wants you to go down on him but he won't return the favor. It would be sixty-nine but he owes you one.

Raziel’s sixty feet tall?” “Actually, he’s only fifty-nine feet tall, but he likes to exaggerate,” said Magnus. Isabelle clicked her tongue in annoyance. “Valentine raised an angel in his cellar. I don’t see why you need all this space—” “Because Valentine is just WAY MORE AWESOME than me,

And kissed her for a hundred and sixty-nine years.

I’m hitting the sack” “Are you twenty-nine or sixty-nine?” The devilish dimples appeared. “Twenty-nine with a sixty-nine waiting at home

This is the sixty-nine," I told him, presenting the magazine in front of him. I put my fingers -- two of them -- on the action, so that he would not overlook it. "Why is it dubbed sixty-nine?" he asked, because he is a person hot on fire with curiosity. "It was invented in 1969. My friend Gregory knows a friend of the nephew of the inventor." "What did people do before 1969?" "Merely blowjobs and masticating box, but never in chorus.

Long story short – the sixty-nine position doesn’t work. You both get too turned on to keep going. It’s a beautiful failure.

Of the four billion life forms which have existed on this planet, three billion, nine hundred and sixty million are now extinct. We don't know why. Some by wanton extinction, some through natural catastrophe, some destroyed by meteorites and asteroids. In the light of these mass extinctions it really does seem unreasonable to suppose that Homo sapiens should be exempt. Our species will have been one of the shortest-lived of all, a mere blink, you may say, in the eye of time.

Some people, I am told, have memories like computers, nothing to do but punch the button and wait for the print-out. Mine is more like a Japanese library of the old style, without a card file or an indexing system or any systematic shelf plan. Nobody knows where anything is except the old geezer in felt slippers who has been shuffling up and down those stacks for sixty-nine years. When you hand him a problem he doesn't come back with a cartful and dump it before you, a jackpot of instant retrieval. He finds one thing, which reminds him of another, which leads him off to the annex, which directs him to the east wing, which sends him back two tiers from where he started. Bit by bit he finds you what you want, but like his boss who seems to be under pressure to examine his life, he takes his time.

(from: Age Sixty-nine) There is this circle I walk that I have learned to love. I hope one day to be a spiral but to the birds I'm a circle.

Say the planet is born at midnight and it runs for one day. First there is nothing. Two hours are lost to lava and meteors. Life doesn’t show up until three or four a.m. Even then, it’s just the barest self-copying bits and pieces. From dawn to late morning—a million million years of branching—nothing more exists than lean and simple cells. Then there is everything. Something wild happens, not long after noon. One kind of simple cell enslaves a couple of others. Nuclei get membranes. Cells evolve organelles. What was once a solo campsite grows into a town. The day is two-thirds done when animals and plants part ways. And still life is only single cells. Dusk falls before compound life takes hold. Every large living thing is a latecomer, showing up after dark. Nine p.m. brings jellyfish and worms. Later that hour comes the breakout—backbones, cartilage, an explosion of body forms. From one instant to the next, countless new stems and twigs in the spreading crown burst open and run. Plants make it up on land just before ten. Then insects, who instantly take to the air. Moments later, tetrapods crawl up from the tidal muck, carrying around on their skin and in their guts whole worlds of earlier creatures. By eleven, dinosaurs have shot their bolt, leaving the mammals and birds in charge for an hour. Somewhere in that last sixty minutes, high up in the phylogenetic canopy, life grows aware. Creatures start to speculate. Animals start teaching their children about the past and the future. Animals learn to hold rituals. Anatomically modern man shows up four seconds before midnight. The first cave paintings appear three seconds later. And in a thousandth of a click of the second hand, life solves the mystery of DNA and starts to map the tree of life itself. By midnight, most of the globe is converted to row crops for the care and feeding of one species. And that’s when the tree of life becomes something else again. That’s when the giant trunk starts to teeter.

(from: Age Sixty-nine) Often, lately, the night is a cold maw and stars the scattered white teeth of the gods, which spare none of us. At dawn I have birds, clearly divine messengers that I don't understand yet day by day feel the grace of their intentions.

I’m feeling generous. We’ll make it sixty-nine thousand. I just love writing 69s. I’ll even put that in the memo. For sixty-nining your beautiful son.

If people had true knowledge of the world perhaps they would not take up arms and so perhaps he could be an aggregator of information from distant places and then the world would be a more peaceful place. He had been perfectly serious. That illusion had lasted from age forty-nine to age sixty-five. And then he had come to think that what people needed, at bottom, was not only information but tales of the remote, the mysterious, dressed up as hard information. And he, like a runner, immobile in his smeared printing apron bringing it to them. Then the listeners would for a small space of time drift away into a healing place like curative waters.

-A Word On Statistics- Out of every hundred people, those who always know better: fifty-two. Unsure of every step: almost all the rest. Ready to help, if it doesn't take long: forty-nine. Always good, because they cannot be otherwise: fourwell, maybe five. Able to admire without envy: eighteen. Led to error by youth (which passes): sixty, plus or minus. Those not to be messed with: four-and-forty. Living in constant fear of someone or something: seventy-seven. Capable of happiness: twenty-some-odd at most. Harmless alone, turning savage in crowds: more than half, for sure. Cruel when forced by circumstances: it's better not to know, not even approximately. Wise in hindsight: not many more than wise in foresight. Getting nothing out of life except things: thirty (though I would like to be wrong). Balled up in pain and without a flashlight in the dark: eighty-three, sooner or later. Those who are just: quite a few, thirty-five. But if it takes effort to understand: three. Worthy of empathy: ninety-nine. Mortal: one hundred out of one hundred a figure that has never varied yet.

Sexually, I wanted him six days to Sunday. Sixty-nine days to Sunday, in fact, and I wasn’t even a sixty-nine kind of girl. Confession: I was, of course I was. I’d just never acted like it in real life. But I’d do it with Charlie. In a heartbeat. And were there other numbers? I’d do those too.

And so whether you were six with the chicken pox, nine with the flu, twelve with a broken arm, or fifteen with menstrual cramps, you could count on sixty solid minutes with the company of that old seventies set, lots of one-dollar bets, and advice to neuter your pet, all crunched into the best sick-day game show yet!

Anyone who’s had a visit from them has discovered an important fact about life: namely, that misery grows up all by itself, in a hidden place, without your even being aware of it, and then one day, suddenly, it knocks on your door. Happiness is just the opposite. Happiness is a cute little flower on your veranda, or a baby canary. You can see it growing, little by little, right before your eyes.

The story ends. It was written for several reasons. Nine of them are secrets. The tenth is that one should never cease considering human love, which remains as grisly and golden as ever, no matter what is tattooed upon the warm tympanic page.

Adama was loyal—not to me, mind you. He was a believer, but it wasn’t me he believed in. He believed in something that was part of the very air we breathed in the late sixties, and he was loyal to that something. It wouldn’t be easy to explain what that something was. Whatever it was, though, it made us free. It saved us from being bound to a single set of values.

I hang up, and Ben turns to me. “So who’s the lucky sixty-nine-year-old?” I roll my eyes. “Your dad.” He smirks. “My dad is dead.” “That,” I reply, “would explain why he’s been so pleasantly quiet in bed.

But my darling was as frail as a bird. She died nine days later. After sixty-one years together, she simply clutched my hand and exhaled. Although

We did sixty-nine that night. Larry went on top so he didn’t get squished. He’s really good at sucking dick. I wondered if he’d got exams in that too.

984; 85; 3; 63;, 1,000,000 The Eiffel Tower is nine hundred eighty-four feet high. On a clear day, you can see eighty-five miles from the top. It has three elevators. Each elevator can carry sixty-three people. It cost about one million dollars to build Eiffel Tower.

For the first time in her sixty-nine years she felt the fear: the fear every woman knows is always waiting for her, the possibility that lurks and scuttles in the shadows of her mind, even if she’s spent her entire life being so tenderly loved and protected by good men.

I'm sixty-nine years old, and I have no plans to run for reelection. Do you think I give a damn?

It dawned upon everybody that Aggie, at perhaps a hundred and sixty pounds and five feet nine and a half, was, as Beth later said, 'dynamite in the physical culture department.

Then wine me, dine me and sixty-nine me,” she growled. “Feel free to reverse the order.

Adams grew up in the sixties, and the Beatles “planted a seed in my head that made it explode. Every nine months there’d be a new album which would be an earth-shattering development from where they were before. We were so obsessed by them that when ‘Penny Lane’ came out and we hadn’t heard it on the radio, we beat up this boy who had heard it until he hummed the tune to us. People now ask if Oasis are as good as the Beatles. I don’t think they are as good as the Rutles.

I have tutored Little Igor to be a man of this world. For example, I exhibited him a smutty magazine three days yore, so that he should be appraised of the many positions in which I am carnal. 'This is sixty-nine,' I told him, presenting the magazine in front of him. I put my fingers--two of them--on the action, so that he would not overlook it. 'Why is it dubbed sixty-nine?' he asked, because he is a person hot on fire with curiosity. 'It was invented in 1969. My friend Gregory knows a friend of the nephew of the inventor.' 'What did people do before 1969?' 'Merely blowjobs and masticating box, but never in chorus.

The cavity formed between a planetary body and its ionosphere acts as a natural resonator; most people who lived on Earth were unaware that they lived on a gigantic gong that boomed out exactly sixty-nine times every day.

If people had true knowledge of the world perhaps they would not take up arms and so perhaps he could be an aggregator of information from distant places and then the world would be a more peaceful place. He had been perfectly serious. That illusion had lasted from age forty-nine to age sixty-five. And

You ever tried sixty-nine, Lola? I think you'd like it. You're a good multi-tasker.

You do realize Kingsley is forty-five, yes?” “I told them,” Nora said. “Age is only a number,” Angie said. “So is sixty-nine,” Maxine said.

And eight days later, he shows up on my mother’s doorstep. He hands her nine thousand four hundred sixty-two dollars, a Rolex, and some emerald earrings. And he takes me home with him.

I've written you sixty-seven love poems. Here’s another one for you. But really, for me. These poems are the candles that I light with the fire you have ignited in me. I place this candle here and another there so even if the stars have argued with the moon and are sulking away in a corner, you can still find your way to me. Sixty-eight poems now. What does the future hold for us? Joy? Disappointment? Gentle caresses? And subtle neglect? I hope the good is more than the bad. Much more. For what is the point of love if by lighting these candles our own flame loses its brightness? I know the good is more than the bad. Much more. I cannot wait to write you sixty-nine.

I have to admit we are locked in the most exquisite mysterious muck. This muck heaves and palpitates. It is multi-directional and has a mayor. To describe it takes many hundreds of thousands of words. Our muck is only a part of a much greater muck -- the nation-state -- which is itself the creation of that muck of mucks, human consciousness. Of course all these things also have a touch of sublimity -- as when Moonbelly sings, for example, or all the lights go out. What a happy time that was, when all the electricity went away! If only we could re-create that paradise! By, for instance, all forgetting to pay our electric bills at the same time. All nine million of us. Then we'd all get those little notices that say unless we remit within five days the lights will go out. We all stand up from our chairs with the notice in ours hands. The same thought drifts across the furrowed surface of nine million minds. We wink at each other, through the walls.

My mind spends most the time in the gutter on the corner of sixty nine street and anal sex avenue. It's the breast part of the trip to my favorite destination vagina. I would live there if I could get bacon delivered.

What will that mean to each of you? “It will mean that those of you who might have lived to be seventy-one must die at seventy. Some of you who might have lived to be eighty-six must cough up your ghost at eighty-five. That’s a great age. A year more or less doesn’t sound like much. When the time comes, boys, you may regret. But, you will be able to say, this year I spent well, I gave for Pip, I made a loan of life for sweet Pipkin, the fairest apple that ever almost fell too early off the harvest tree. Some of you at forty-nine must cross life off at forty-eight. Some at fifty-five must lay them down to Forever’s Sleep at fifty-four. Do you catch the whole thing intact now, boys? Do you add the figures? Is the arithmetic plain? A year! Who will bid three hundred and sixty-five entire days from out his own soul, to get old Pipkin back? Think, boys. Silence. Then, speak.

We dramatically overstate the role of science deniers, because it allows science acceptors to feel righteous without challenging us to act on the knowledge we accept. Only 14 percent of Americans deny climate change, which is a significantly lower percentage than who deny evolution, or that the earth orbits the sun. Sixty-nine percent of American voters—including the majority of Republicans—say that the United States should have remained in the Paris climate accord.

I’d have you on the floor, pulling a sixty-nine that wouldn’t end until I tasted a dozen of your orgasms. Before you could even think about recovering, I’d fuck you in every way a male can fuck a female. And I wouldn’t stop. Not until you begged.

If people had true knowledge of the world perhaps they would not take up arms and so perhaps he could be an aggregator of information from distant places and then the world would be a more peaceful place. He had been perfectly serious. That illusion had lasted from age forty-nine to age sixty-five.

SIXTY-NINE She was Amy, and she was forever. She was one of Twelve and also the other, the one above and behind, the Zero. She was the Girl from Nowhere, the One Who Walked In, who lived a thousand years; Amy of Multitudes, the Girl with the Souls Inside Her. She was Amy. She was Amy. She was Amy. She

The following year the house was substantially remodeled, and the conservatory removed. As the walls of the now crumbling wall were being torn down, one of the workmen chanced upon a small leatherbound book that had apparently been concealed behind a loose brick or in a crevice in the wall. By this time Emily Dickinson was a household name in Amherst. It happened that this carpenter was a lover of poetry- and hers in particular- and when he opened the little book and realized that that he had found her diary, he was “seized with a violent trembling,” as he later told his grandson. Both electrified and terrified by the discovery, he hid the book in his lunch bucket until the workday ended and then took it home. He told himself that after he had read and savored every page, he would turn the diary over to someone who would know how to best share it with the public. But as he read, he fell more and more deeply under the poet’s spell and began to imagine that he was her confidant. He convinced himself that in his new role he was no longer obliged to give up the diary. Finally, having brushed away the light taps of conscience, he hid the book at the back of an oak chest in his bedroom, from which he would draw it out periodically over the course of the next sixty-four years until he had virtually memorized its contents. Even his family never knew of its existence. Shortly before his death in 1980 at the age of eighty-nine, the old man finally showed his most prized possession to his grandson (his only son having preceded him in death), confessing that his delight in it had always been tempered by a nagging guilt and asking that the young man now attempt to atone for his grandfather’s sin. The grandson, however, having inherited both the old man’s passion for poetry and his tendency towards paralysis of conscience, and he readily succumbed to the temptation to hold onto the diary indefinitely while trying to decide what ought to be done with it.

Sixty-nine was an interesting age--an age of infinite possibilities--an age when at last the experience of a lifetime was beginning to tell. But to feel old--that was different, a tired, discouraged state of mind when one was inclined to ask oneself depressing questions. What was he after all? A little dried-up elderly man, with neither chick nor child, with no human belongings, only a valuable Art collection which seemed at the moment strangely unsatisfying. No one to care whether he lived or died...

When Julia was twenty-nine, her hair was already bar-coded. Now, at sixty-two, it was a solid helmet of bright pewter, level with her lean, brown jawbone.

Honey, live like you got to live. Chuck Berry, nineteen sixty-nine.

Dying while looking like the whore from planet sixty-nine wasn’t how she wanted to go out.

I was an intelligence agent for the British government. Agent double-oh-seven? she asked lightly. No, he said in a grave tone, then leaned forward and whispered, Agent sixty-nine.

My father had died, and very swiftly too, of cancer of the esophagus. He was seventy-nine. I am sixty-one. In whatever kind of 'race' life may be, I have very abruptly become a finalist.

Why is it so hard to hear a story where the victim is cared for, justice properly served? Then came Judge Aquilina. I’d never questioned the short time limit I was given to read my statement, until Judge Aquilina made time for one hundred and sixty-nine statements. She made it clear each one was important. She invited restoration and compassion into a space I had associated only with torture.

For black families, each dollar creates only sixty-nine cents in total wealth.25 This is why the wealth gap between blacks and whites can continue to grow even when de jure discrimination ended decades ago.

The respectability of Mr. Vholes has even been cited with crushing effect before Parliamentary committees, as in the following blue minutes of a distinguished attorney’s evidence. “Question (number five hundred and seventeen thousand eight hundred and sixty-nine): If I understand you, these forms of practice indisputably occasion delay? Answer: Yes, some delay. Question: And great expense? Answer: Most assuredly they cannot be gone through for nothing. Question: And unspeakable vexation? Answer: I am not prepared to say that. They have never given ME any vexation; quite the contrary. Question: But you think that their abolition would damage a class of practitioners? Answer: I have no doubt of it. Question: Can you instance any type of that class? Answer: Yes. I would unhesitatingly mention Mr. Vholes. He would be ruined. Question: Mr. Vholes is considered, in the profession, a respectable man? Answer: “ — which proved fatal to the inquiry for ten years — “Mr. Vholes is considered, in the profession, a MOST respectable man.

Inhale. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. Exhale. Uno, dos, tres, cuatro, cinco, seis, siete, ocho, nueve, diez. Inhale. Un, deux, trois, quatre, cinq, six, sept, huit, neuf, dix. Exhale.

One National Geographic survey revealed that 85 percent of Americans between ages eighteen and twenty-four were unable to locate either Afghanistan or Iraq on a map. Sixty-nine percent couldn’t find Great Britain,

Earlier, in Hour 9, we examined Daniel 9 where the angel Gabriel told Daniel that from the commandment to restore and rebuild Jerusalem unto Messiah the King would be 173,880 days, sixty-nine weeks of 360-day years. If you do the arithmetic, you’ll discover that the number of days between the Decree of Artaxerxes Longimanus on March 12, 445 B.C., to the triumphal entry which happened on April 6, A.D. 32, is precisely 173,880 days.

Throughout my life, there has always been a number that sounded old. When I was sixteen, it was twenty-seven; at twenty-nine, it was forty-two; at thirty-eight, it was fifty-two. At sixty-five, however, it was sixty-five.

I’m equal opportunity. I like a woman on top, I like to be on top, I like a woman on all fours, I like her bent over, I like her up against the wall. I’m good with reverse cowgirl, sixty-nine, inside, outside, upside-down,

From forty-nine to fifty-six this aloneness becomes your focus of being. Everything else in the world loses meaning. The only remaining meaningful thing is this aloneness. From fifty-six to sixty-three you become absolutely what you are going to become: the potential blossoms, and from sixty-three to seventy you start getting ready to drop the body. Now you know you are not the body, you know you are not the mind either. The body was known as separate from you somewhere around the time when you were thirty-five. That the mind is separate from you was known near the time when you were forty-nine. Now, everything else drops except the witnessing self. Just the pure awareness, the flame of awareness remains with you—and this is the preparation for death.

Harry, I’m sorry for whatever pain this is causing you, truly sorry, but it’s very important that at this point in our lives we don’t let guilt feelings motivate us. I’m trying to look honestly into myself, too see who I am, and where I should be going. I want us both, Harry, to come to a decision we can live with. It’s the year nineteen sixty-nine and there’s no reason for two mature people to smother each other to death simply out of inertia. I’m searching for a valid identity and I suggest you do the same.

I never remember, in all my Christian course, a period now (in March, 1895) of sixty-nine years and four months, that I ever SINCERELY and PATIENTLY sought to know the will of God by the teaching of the Holy Ghost, through the instrumentality of the Word of God, but I have been ALWAYS directed rightly. But if honesty of heart and uprightness before God were lacking, or if I did not patiently wait upon God for instruction, or if I preferred the counsel of my fellow men to the declarations of the Word of the living God, I made great mistakes." GEORGE MÜLLER.

If we could shrink the Earth’s 5.7 billion population to a village of one hundred people, the resulting profile would look like this:        Sixty Asians, fourteen Africans, twelve Europeans, eight Latin Americans, five from the United States and Canada, and one from New Zealand or Australia.        Eighty-two would be nonwhite.        Sixty-seven would be non-Christian.        Thirty-two percent of the entire world’s wealth would be in the hands of five people.        All five people would be citizens of the United States.        Sixty-seven would be unable to read.        Fifty would suffer from malnutrition. Thirty-three would be without access to a safe water supply.        Eighty would live in substandard housing. Thirty-nine would lack access to improved sanitation. Twenty-four would not have electricity.        Only one would have a college education.30

You might not believe you have anything in common with this fruit, but you do. DNA. Up to sixty percent. Now turn and look at the person next to you. Does she look familiar? She may or may not. Still, you and she share even more: ninety-nine point nine percent of your DNA—as you each do with every other human on earth.” She set the tomato down and held up a photograph of Rosa Parks. “That’s why I stand with our leaders of the civil rights movement, including the very brave Rosa Parks. Discrimination based on skin color is not only scientifically ludicrous, it’s also a sign of profound ignorance.

I am constantly mystified by what John ends up remembering… I just don’t understand why he’s able to hang on to information like that, while so many other more important memories evaporate. Then again, I suppose so much of what stays with us is often insignificant. The memories we take to the ends of our lives have no real rhyme or reason, especially when you think of the endless things that you do over the course of a day, a week, a month, a year, a lifetime. All the cups of coffee, hand-washings, changes of clothes, lunches, goings to the bathroom, headaches, naps, walks to school, trips to the grocery store, conversations about the weather—all the things so unimportant they should be immediately forgotten. Yet they aren’t. I often think of the Chinese red bathrobe I had when I was twenty-seven years old; the sound of our first cat Charlie’s feet on the linoleum of our old house; the hot rarefied air around aluminum pot the moment before the kernels of popcorn burst open. I think of these things as often as I think about getting married or giving birth or the end of the Second World War. What is truly amazing is that before you know it, sixty years go by and you can remember maybe eight or nine important events, along with a thousand meaningless ones. How can that be? You want to think there’s a pattern to it all because it makes you feel better, gives you some sense of a reason why we’re here, but there really isn’t any. People look for God in these patterns, these reasons, but only because they don’t know where else to look. Things happen to us: some of it important, most of it not, and a little of it stays with us till the end. What stays after that? I’ll be damned if I know. (pp.174-175)

have exactly one hour to find your runaway table, get back your synco-whatsit, and install it in this engine, or the Argo II explodes, destroying Bunker Nine and most of the woods.” “Basically,” Leo said. Jason frowned. “We should alert the other campers. We might have to evacuate them.” “No!” Leo’s voice broke. “Look, the explosion won’t destroy the whole camp. Just the woods. I’m pretty sure. Like sixty-five percent sure.” “Well, that’s a relief,” Piper muttered. “Besides,” Leo said, “we don’t have time, and I—I can’t tell the others. If they find out how badly I’ve messed up…” Jason and Piper looked at each other. The clock display changed to 59:00. “Fine,” Jason said. “But we’d better hurry.

By the front door is a table normally used for mail and car keys. On it sits a single sheet of paper bearing six typed lines. Holding my breath, I pick it up and begin to read. At sixty-nine, Virginia Hope Wrote her nurse this little note Thank you, dear, for saving me Now it’s time to let you be I take my leave, walking tall Knowing that I fooled them all

Take a good look at this tomato,” he heard a vaguely familiar-looking woman on the television say, a pencil sticking out from behind her head. “You might not believe you have anything in common with this fruit, but you do. DNA. Up to sixty percent. Now turn and look at the person next to you. Does she look familiar? She may or may not. Still, you and she share even more: ninety-nine point nine percent of your DNA—as you each do with every other human on earth.” She set the tomato down and held up a photograph of Rosa Parks. “That’s why I stand with our leaders of the civil rights movement, including the very brave Rosa Parks. Discrimination based on skin color is not only scientifically ludicrous, it’s also a sign of profound ignorance.

Antidepression medication is temperamental. Somewhere around fifty-nine or sixty I noticed the drug I’d been taking seemed to have stopped working. This is not unusual. The drugs interact with your body chemistry in different ways over time and often need to be tweaked. After the death of Dr. Myers, my therapist of twenty-five years, I’d been seeing a new doctor whom I’d been having great success with. Together we decided to stop the medication I’d been on for five years and see what would happen... DEATH TO MY HOMETOWN!! I nose-dived like the diving horse at the old Atlantic City steel pier into a sloshing tub of grief and tears the likes of which I’d never experienced before. Even when this happens to me, not wanting to look too needy, I can be pretty good at hiding the severity of my feelings from most of the folks around me, even my doctor. I was succeeding well with this for a while except for one strange thing: TEARS! Buckets of ’em, oceans of ’em, cold, black tears pouring down my face like tidewater rushing over Niagara during any and all hours of the day. What was this about? It was like somebody opened the floodgates and ran off with the key. There was NO stopping it. 'Bambi' tears... 'Old Yeller' tears... 'Fried Green Tomatoes' tears... rain... tears... sun... tears... I can’t find my keys... tears. Every mundane daily event, any bump in the sentimental road, became a cause to let it all hang out. It would’ve been funny except it wasn’t. Every meaningless thing became the subject of a world-shattering existential crisis filling me with an awful profound foreboding and sadness. All was lost. All... everything... the future was grim... and the only thing that would lift the burden was one-hundred-plus on two wheels or other distressing things. I would be reckless with myself. Extreme physical exertion was the order of the day and one of the few things that helped. I hit the weights harder than ever and paddleboarded the equivalent of the Atlantic, all for a few moments of respite. I would do anything to get Churchill’s black dog’s teeth out of my ass. Through much of this I wasn’t touring. I’d taken off the last year and a half of my youngest son’s high school years to stay close to family and home. It worked and we became closer than ever. But that meant my trustiest form of self-medication, touring, was not at hand. I remember one September day paddleboarding from Sea Bright to Long Branch and back in choppy Atlantic seas. I called Jon and said, “Mr. Landau, book me anywhere, please.” I then of course broke down in tears. Whaaaaaaaaaa. I’m surprised they didn’t hear me in lower Manhattan. A kindly elderly woman walking her dog along the beach on this beautiful fall day saw my distress and came up to see if there was anything she could do. Whaaaaaaaaaa. How kind. I offered her tickets to the show. I’d seen this symptom before in my father after he had a stroke. He’d often mist up. The old man was usually as cool as Robert Mitchum his whole life, so his crying was something I loved and welcomed. He’d cry when I’d arrive. He’d cry when I left. He’d cry when I mentioned our old dog. I thought, “Now it’s me.” I told my doc I could not live like this. I earned my living doing shows, giving interviews and being closely observed. And as soon as someone said “Clarence,” it was going to be all over. So, wisely, off to the psychopharmacologist he sent me. Patti and I walked in and met a vibrant, white-haired, welcoming but professional gentleman in his sixties or so. I sat down and of course, I broke into tears. I motioned to him with my hand; this is it. This is why I’m here. I can’t stop crying! He looked at me and said, “We can fix this.” Three days and a pill later the waterworks stopped, on a dime. Unbelievable. I returned to myself. I no longer needed to paddle, pump, play or challenge fate. I didn’t need to tour. I felt normal.

for. As Napoleon continued, the full extent of his intentions gradually became clearer: having conquered Egypt, he would then mount an expedition to India, where he would attack the British. This force would require 60,000 men, 30,000 of whom would be recruited and trained from amongst the Egyptians; it would take 10,000 horses and 50,000 camels, sufficient to carry supplies for sixty days and water for six. Other provisions would be sequestered on the march, which would take four months to reach the Indus. In India he would link up with the forces of Tippoo Sahib, the ruler of Mysore who had risen against the British and sworn allegiance to French revolutionary ideals. Napoleon concluded by announcing that the entire expedition would cost between eight and nine million francs.

If you’re working, it’s the best therapy for posttraumatic stress,” Juan says. Studies have shown that the gravity of posttraumatic stress is directly proportional to the length of time one lives with the threat of death, and Juan slowly unwinds the trauma of the sixty-nine days he lived inside a thundering mountain by going to work, fixing machines, then going back home, and then returning to work again.

Were his mind not fried he probably would have thought about how lucky he was to be alive – not in the philosophical sense of lucky but in the statistical sense. Nobody survives forty-nine tabs of high grade pure digitalis. As a general rule, twice the prescribed dose of digitalis will off you. Fat’s prescribed dose had been fixed at q.i.d.: four a day. He had swallowed 12.25 times his prescribed daily dose and survived. The infinite mercies of God make no sense whatsoever, in terms of practical considerations. In addition he had downed all his Librium, twenty Quide and sixty Apresoline, plus half a bottle of wine. All that remained of his medication was a bottle of Miles Nervine. Fat was technically dead. Spiritually, he was dead, too. Either he had seen God too soon or he had seen him too late. In any case, it had done him no good at all in terms of survival.

You can’t have women working in an office building after two a.m. unless it’s a public service, but I have to give my clients all-night service, so there on Sixty-ninth Street I’ve got four operators for the three switchboards, and they all live right there in the apartment. That way I can have one at the boards from eight till two at night, and another one from two o’clock on. After nine in the morning three are on, one for each board, for the daytime load.

When my son was six he said, “We don’t know how many years we have for our lives. People die at all ages.” He said it without anguish or remorse, without fear or desire. It has been healing to me to accept in a very simple way that my mother’s life was forty-five years long, that there was nothing beyond that. There was only my expectation that there would be—my mother at eighty-nine, my mother at sixty-three, my mother at forty-six. Those things don’t exist. They never did.

As the prisoners’ commanding officer and senior medical officer, Dorrigo Evans reported to Major Nakamura that four men had died the day before, two overnight, and that this left eight hundred and thirty-eight POWs. Of this eight hundred and thirty-eight, sixty-seven had cholera and were in the cholera compound, and another one hundred and seventy-nine were in hospital with severe illness. A further one hundred and sixty-seven were too ill for any work other than light duties.

TIMELINE OF LAURA INGALLS WILDER’S LIFE 1865-Laura’s sister Mary is born in Pepin, Wisconsin 1867-Laura Ingalls is born in Pepin, Wisconsin 1869-The Ingallses move to Indian Territory, Kansas 1870-Caroline Ingalls, “Carrie,” is born in Kansas 1871-The Ingallses return to the Big Woods of Wisconsin 1874-Lives in a dugout near Walnut Grove, Minnesota 1875-Charles Frederick Ingalls, “Freddy,” is born 1876-Laura’s brother, Freddy, dies at nine months old Laura moves with her family to Burr Oak, Iowa 1877-Grace Ingalls is born in Burr Oak 1879-Mary becomes blind after a fever 1880-The Ingallses begin homesteading in De Smet, Dakota Territory 1885-Almanzo Wilder and Laura Ingalls marry 1886-Rose Wilder born in De Smet 1894-The Wilders move to Mansfield, Missouri 1932-Little House in the Big Woods is published when Laura is sixty-five 1954-Laura awarded the first Laura Ingalls Wilder Award, for her eight-book Little House series 1957-Laura (age ninety) dies at her Rocky Ridge home in Mansfield

Fifteen. Be as careful as crossing frozen water, alert as a Warrior on enemy ground. Be as courteous as a Guest, as fluid as a Stream. Be as shapeable as a block of wood, as receptive as a glass. Don’t seek and don’t expect. Be patient and wait until your mud settles and your water is clear. Be patient and wait. Your mud will settle. Your water will be clear. Sixty-three. Act without doing, work without effort, think of the large as small and the many as few. Confront the difficult while it is easy, accomplish the great one step at a time. Don’t reach and you will find, if you run into trouble throw yourself toward it. Don’t cling to comfort and everything will be comfortable. Seventy-nine. Failure is an opportunity. If you blame others, there is no end to blame. Fulfill your obligations, correct your mistakes. Do what you need to do and step away. Demand nothing and give all. Demand nothing and give all. Twenty-four. Stand on your toes and you won’t stand firm. Rush ahead and you won’t go far. Try to shine and you’ll extinguish your light. Try to define yourself, you won’t know who you are. Don’t try to control others. Let go and let them be. As I read this book it calms me without effort, fills in the blanks of my strategy for survival. Control by letting go of control, fix your problems by forgetting they’re problems. Deal with them and the World and yourself with patience and simplicity and compassion. Let things be, let yourself be, let everything be and accept it as it is. Nothing more. Nothing less. Nothing more.

Just seven minutes after most of Murphysboro was leveled, the Tri-State Tornado hit DeSoto at 2:48 P.M. No town in the path would proportionally suffer a higher fatality rate than this tiny village in which sixty-nine people died. Thirty-three of them were children buried in the burning ruins of the DeSoto Schoolhouse, a heartbreaking record that remains the single worst tornado-related death toll for a school in US history. One in four DeSoto children who walked off to school that day would never come home to supper.

THE TERRORIST ATTACKS came one after another during 1985, all broadcast live on network television to tens of millions of Americans. In June two Lebanese terrorists hijacked TWA Flight 847, murdered a Navy diver on board, and negotiated while mugging for cameras on a Beirut runway. In October the Palestinian terrorist Abu Abbas hijacked the cruise ship Achille Lauro in Italy, murdered a sixty-nine-year-old Jewish-American tourist, Leon Klinghoffer, dumped his body overboard, and ultimately escaped to Baghdad with Egyptian and Italian collaboration. Just after Christmas, Palestinian gunmen with the Abu Nidal Organization opened fire on passengers lined up at El Al ticket counters in Vienna and Rome, killing nineteen people, among them five Americans. One of the American victims was an eleven-year-old girl named Natasha Simpson who died in her father’s arms after a gunman unloaded an extra round in her head just to make sure. The attackers, boyish products of Palestinian refugee camps, had been pumped full of amphetamines by their handlers just before the holiday attacks.

Are you kidding me?” Della asked. “What?” She’d envisioned several different types of meeting places with the Vampire Council, but never a family diner that was mostly a hangout of the over-sixty crowd. “Benny’s? I’m meeting the Vampire Council at a family diner where you can get eggs and raisin toast for a buck ninety-nine?” “I personally like their pancakes,” Chase said. She continued to stare. “Really?” “They’re good pancakes.” Hunter, C. C. (2014-10-28). Eternal: Shadow Falls: After Dark (p. 316). St. Martin's Press. Kindle Edition.

In the afterlife you relive all your experiences, but this time with the events reshuffled into a new order: all the moments that share a quality are grouped together. You spend two months driving the street in front of your house, seven months having sex. You sleep for thirty years without opening your eyes. For five months straight you flip through magazines while sitting on a toilet. You take all your pain at once, all twenty-seven intense hours of it. Bones break, cars crash, skin is cut, babies are born. Once you make it through, it’s agony-free for the rest of your afterlife. But that doesn’t mean it’s always pleasant. You spend six days clipping your nails. Fifteen months looking for lost items. Eighteen months waiting in line. Two years of boredom: staring out a bus window, sitting in an airport terminal. One year reading books. Your eyes hurt, and you itch, because you can’t take a shower until it’s your time to take your marathon two-hundred-day shower. Two weeks wondering what happens when you die. One minute realizing your body is falling. Seventy-seven hours of confusion. One hour realizing you’ve forgotten someone’s name. Three weeks realizing you are wrong. Two days lying. Six weeks waiting for a green light. Seven hours vomiting. Fourteen minutes experiencing pure joy. Three months doing laundry. Fifteen hours writing your signature. Two days tying shoelaces. Sixty-seven days of heartbreak. Five weeks driving lost. Three days calculating restaurant tips. Fifty-one days deciding what to wear. Nine days pretending you know what is being talked about. Two weeks counting money. Eighteen days staring into the refrigerator.

Under the Constitution, the candidate with the most Electoral College votes becomes president; the candidate who comes in second becomes vice president. In 1796, Federalists wanted Adams as president and Thomas Pinckney as vice president. But in the Electoral College, Adams got seventy-one votes, Jefferson sixty-eight, and Pinckney only fifty-nine. Federalist electors had been instructed to cast the second of their two votes for Pinckney; instead, many had cast it for Jefferson. Jefferson therefore became Adams’s vice president, to the disappointment of everyone. During Adams’s stormy administration, the distance between the two parties widened. Weakened by the weight of his own pride and not content with issuing warnings about the danger of parties, Adams attempted to outlaw the opposition. In 1798, while the United States was engaged in an undeclared war with France, Congress passed the Alien and Sedition Acts, granting to the president the power to imprison noncitizens he deemed dangerous and to punish printers who opposed his administration: twenty-five people were arrested for sedition, fifteen indicted, and ten

Crowding in many London districts was almost unimaginable. In St. Giles, the worst of London’s rookeries—scene of William Hogarth’s famous engraving Gin Lane—fifty-four thousand people crowded into just a few streets. By one count, eleven hundred people lived in twenty-seven houses along one alley; that is more than forty people per dwelling. In Spitalfields, farther east, inspectors found sixty-three people living in a single house. The house had nine beds—one for every seven occupants. A new word, of unknown provenance, sprang into being to describe such neighborhoods: slums.

In the 1930s, the Nazis borrowed the frugal image of the one-pot meal, putting it to ideological use. In 1933, Hitler’s government announced that Germans should put aside one Sunday, from October to March, to eat a one-pot meal: Eintopf. The idea was that people would save enough money in this way to donate whatever was saved to the poor. Cookbooks were hastily rewritten to take account of the new policy. One recipe collection listed no fewer than sixty-nine Eintopfs, including macaroni, goulash, Irish stew, Serbian rice soup, numerous cabbagey medleys, and Old German potato soup.

The prince to come, the Antichrist, shall confirm a covenant with many for one “week” – that is, seven years. Sixty-nine weeks of years have been fulfilled, yet this future 70th week has more details described in both the Old and New Testament than does any other predicted time in history. It’s been isolated, separated from the other 69 weeks and classified by itself as the 70th week of Daniel. Because it is a week of years, many people refer to it as the Seven Year Tribulation. This is technically incorrect. The week lasts a full seven years, but the Great Tribulation is relegated to the last half of that week.

Pen, you really shouldn’t use the same password for all your accounts. I’ve headed off three hackers in the last week who would’ve gotten into your PayPal, bank, and electric company accounts.” “What?” Penelope was obviously confused at the change in subject, but Cade merely relaxed back in his seat and kept his eyes on Beth as she fidgeted uncomfortably. “Using PenisGod isn’t a good username for things like Amazon and eBay. And you really need to delete your craigslist account because calling yourself a penis god is only attracting weirdos. You probably don’t even remember you had that old ad up when you were trying to sell your bicycle. Well, it’s one of the most clicked-on ads on the site for San Antonio. I’m not exaggerating either. You had four hundred and sixty-nine messages—and I’m not even going to comment on the sixty-nine thing. But three hundred and fourteen of those contained pictures of men’s dicks. Fifty-seven contained marriage proposals, most from overseas; twenty-seven were from women who were interested in a threesome with you, fifty-five were spam, people trying to get you to click on links or buy some crap product, and the remaining sixteen emails were religious in nature, telling you to repent for your soul.” “I should probably be pissed you got into my account, but I trust you, so I’m not. But it’s not penis god!” Penelope exclaimed huffily. “It’s Pen IS God.” Cade burst out laughing. “Seriously, sis? Penis god? Just wait until the guys hear this!

nine-hour flight to California aboard a TWA Super Constellation, with room for no fewer than sixty-four passengers. Next we see the simple funfair of the original Disneyland. At the hotel, the Barstows are jubilant that the chic swimming pool is open to them. Yes, the days when such luxury was reserved for the stylish elite are over. The family deals with its budgetary constraints by not eating in restaurants but picnicking outdoors. There is no hint of any doubt or cynicism. Every minute of the movie is filled with sun, innocence and boundless enthusiasm. It’s true, Barstow says at the end, Walt Disney is right: Disneyland is ‘the happiest place on earth’. The entire family is ‘forever grateful to Scotch brand cellophane tape’ for the experience. The closing chorus of this charming cantata

The article mentioned that Onwas was about sixty years old and had lived his entire life in the bush, camping with an extended family of two dozen. Onwas did not keep track of years, only seasons and moons. He lived with just a handful of possessions, enjoyed abundant leisure time, and represented one of the final links to the deepest root of the human family tree. Our genus, Homo, arose two and a half million years ago, and for more than ninety-nine percent of human existence, we all lived like Onwas, in small bands of nomadic hunter-gatherers. Though the groups may have been tight-knit and communal, nearly everyone, anthropologists conjecture, spent significant parts of their lives surrounded by quiet, either alone or with a few others, foraging for edible plants and stalking prey in the wild. This is who we truly are.

He’d noticed that his grandson was working too hard, and he was the one who told him about the marbles. He told it this way. He said that the average life span for men was around seventy-five years. That meant thirty-nine hundred Saturdays—to play when you were a kid and to be with your family when you got older and wiser.” “I see,” I said. “Or to play once you got older. Or even to give lectures to anyone who’ll listen.” “Shush, Alex. Now, listen. So the grandfather figured out that his grandson, who was forty-three, had about sixteen hundred and sixty Saturdays left in his life. Statistically speaking. So what he did was he bought two large jars and filled them with beautiful cat’s-eye marbles. He gave them to his grandson. And he told him that every Saturday, he should take one marble out of the jar. Just one, and just as a reminder that he had only so many Saturdays left, and that they were precious

What is the next unit of time after milliseconds?” “Microseconds.” “Correct. What is the next?” “Nanoseconds.” “There you go,” the professor revealed. “Computers and androids like Christmas operate on nanoseconds. A nanosecond to them is a precision unit like a millisecond to you and I. Now try to think what doing something for fifteen minutes is to them. A millisecond is one million nanoseconds. One second is one billion nanoseconds. A minute is sixty billion nanoseconds. Fifteen minutes equals to nine hundred billion nanoseconds. Multiply that by a million for scale - that's the disparity between a human precision unit and a computer precision unit we first talked about. What do you get? Nine hundred quadrillion nanoseconds. That is ten thousand four hundred seventeen days, one thousand four hundred eighty-eight weeks, three hundred forty-two months. That is twenty-eight point five years. Does that seem like ages to you or what?” (What constitutes "ages" to machines)

That all plants immediately and substantially stem from the element water alone I have learnt from the following experiment. I took an earthern vessel in which I placed two hundred pounds of earth dried in an oven, and watered with rain water. I planted in it a willow tree weighing five pounds. Five years later it had developed a tree weighing one hundred and sixty-nine pounds and about three ounces. Nothing but rain (or distilled water) had been added. The large vessel was placed in earth and covered by an iron lid with a tin-surface that was pierced with many holes. I have not weighed the leaves that came off in the four autumn seasons. Finally I dried the earth in the vessel again and found the same two hundred pounds of it diminished by about two ounces. Hence one hundred and sixty-four pounds of wood, bark and roots had come up from water alone. (1648) [A diligent experiment that was quantitatively correct only as far as it goes. He overlooked the essential role of air and photosynthesis in the growth process]

I would not be able to explain the highly complex process of wealth concentration to you,” the alien said, “but in essence it was no different than the operations of capital markets in your world. In the time of my great-grandfather, sixty percent of the wealth of the First Earth was under the control of ten million; in the world of my grandfather, eighty percent of our world's wealth was in the hands of a mere ten thousand. And, when my father was young, ninety percent of the wealth was held by no more than forty-two individuals. “When I was born, capitalism on the First Earth had reached the peak of peaks, producing an almost unbelievable marvel of wealth: Ninety-nine percent of the wealth of our world was now in the hands of single person! That person was known as the 'Last Entrepreneur'. “Even though there was still a gap between rich and poor among the other two billion, they were vying for nothing more than the remaining one percent of the world's wealth. And so the First Earth became a world with one rich man and two billion poor.

What is contrary to the visible truth must change or disappear—that's the law of life. We have this advantage over our ancestors of a thousand years ago, that we can see the past in depth, which they couldn't. We have this other advantage, that we can see it in breadth—an ability that likewise escaped them. For a world population of two thousand two hundred and fifty millions, one can count on the earth a hundred and seventy religions of a certain importance—each of them claiming, of course, to be the repository of the truth. At least a hundred and sixty-nine of them, therefore, are mistaken! Amongst the religions practised to-day, there is none that goes back further than two thousand five hundred years. But there have been human beings, in the baboon category, for at least three hundred thousand years. There is less distance between the man-ape and the ordinary modern man than there is between the ordinary modern man and a man like Schopenhauer. In comparison with this millenary past, what does a period of two thousand years signify? The universe, in its material elements, has the same composition whether we're speaking of the earth, the sun or any other planet. It is impossible to suppose nowadays that organic life exists only on our planet. Does the knowledge brought by science make men happy? That I don't know. But I observe that man can be happy by deluding himself with false knowledge. I grant one must cultivate tolerance. It's senseless to encourage man in the idea that he's a king of creation, as the scientist of the past century tried to make him believe. That same man who, in order to get about quicker, has to straddle a horse—that mammiferous, brainless being! I don't know a more ridiculous claim. The Russians were entitled to attack their priests, but they had no right to assail the idea of a supreme force. It's a fact that we're feeble creatures, and that a creative force exists. To seek to deny it is folly. In that case, it's better to believe something false than not to believe anything at all. Who's that little Bolshevik professor who claims to triumph over creation? People like that, we'll break them. Whether we rely on the catechism or on philosophy, we have possibilities in reserve, whilst they, with their purely materialistic conceptions, can only devour one another.

I Will Not Tease Rebecca Grimes I have to write one hundred times: "I will not tease Rebecca Grimes." Okay, that's one. I'm far from done. (This isn't gonna be much fun.) "I will not tease Rebecca Grimes." That's two. I'm paying for my crimes. It's all because I pulled her hair And put spaghetti on her chair. Because I gave her goofy looks And squirted mustard on her books, I have to write one hundred times: "I will not tease Rebecca Grimes." That's three. Whoopee. It's going slow. Just ninety-seven more to go. "I will not tease" (I'm keeping score.) "Rebecca Grimes." (Now that makes four.) I'm soaked with sweat. My shirt is damp. I think I'm getting writer's cramp. "I will not, will not, will not tease Rebecca Grimes!" Can I stop, please? The teacher frowns, and that means no. I still have sixty-six to go. "I will-will-will not-not-not-not Tease-tease-tease-tease..." It's getting hot. "I will not tease Rebecca Grimes." That's ninety-nine. The school bell chimes. Just one more line and I'll be through. Rebecca Grimes, this one's for you! My final line will rhyme with "Grimes": "I will not tease Rebecca...Slimes!" Rebecca Slimes! Ha ha! That's great! I'd better hide it. Oops! Too late! The teacher sees what I wrote down. She takes my paper with a frown. I now must write one thousand times: "I will not tease Rebecca Grimes.

At some point in life-sometimes in youth, sometimes late-each of us is due to awaken to our mortality. There are so many triggers: a glance in a mirror at your sagging jowls, graying hair, stooping shoulders; the march of birthdays, especially those round decades-fifty, sixty, seventy; meeting a friend you have not seen in a long while and being shocked at how he or she has aged; seeing old photographs of yourself and those long dead who peopled your childhood; encountering Mister Death in a dream. What do you feel when you have such experiences? What do you do with them? Do you plunge into frenetic activity to burn off the anxiety and avoid the subject? Try to remove wrinkles with cosmetic surgery or dye your hair? Decide to stay thirty-nine for a few more years? Distract yourself quickly with work and everyday life routine? Forget all such experiences? Ignore your dreams? I urge you not to distract yourself. Instead, savor awakening. Take advantage of it. Pause as you stare into the photograph of the younger you. Let the poignant moment sweep over you and linger a bit; taste the sweetness of it as well as the bitterness. Keep in mind the advantage of remaining aware of death, of hugging its shadow to you. Such awareness can integrate the darkness with your spark of life and enhance your life while you still have it. The way to value life, the way to feel compassion for others, the way to love anything with greatest depth is to be aware that these experiences are destined to be lost.

I was sleeping with my head on the wooden arm of a seat as six attendants of the theater converged with their night’s total of swept-up rubbish and created a huge dusty pile that reached to my nose as I snored head down – till they almost swept me away too. This was reported to me by Dean, who was watching from ten seats behind. All the cigarette butts, the bottles, the matchbooks, the come and the gone were swept up in this pile. Had they taken me with it, Dean would never have seen me again. He would have had to roam the entire United States and look in every garbage pail from coast to coast before he found me embryonically convoluted among the rubbishes of my life, his life, and the life of everybody concerned and not concerned. What would I have said to him from my rubbish womb? ‘Don’t bother me, man, I’m happy where I am. You lost me one night in Detroit in August nineteen forty-nine. What right have you to come and disturb my reverie in this pukish can?’ In 1942 I was the star in one of the filthiest dramas of all time. I was a seaman, and went to the Imperial Café on Scollay Square in Boston to drink; I drank sixty glasses of beer and retired to the toilet, where I wrapped myself around the toilet bowl and went to sleep. During the night at least a hundred seamen and assorted civilians came in and cast their sentient debouchments on me till I was unrecognizably caked. What difference does it make after all? – anonymity in the world of men is better than fame in heaven, for what’s heaven? what’s earth? All in the mind.

Moore’s Law, the rule of thumb in the technology industry, tells us that processor chips—the small circuit boards that form the backbone of every computing device—double in speed every eighteen months. That means a computer in 2025 will be sixty-four times faster than it is in 2013. Another predictive law, this one of photonics (regarding the transmission of information), tells us that the amount of data coming out of fiber-optic cables, the fastest form of connectivity, doubles roughly every nine months. Even if these laws have natural limits, the promise of exponential growth unleashes possibilities in graphics and virtual reality that will make the online experience as real as real life, or perhaps even better. Imagine having the holodeck from the world of Star Trek, which was a fully immersive virtual-reality environment for those aboard a ship, but this one is able to both project a beach landscape and re-create a famous Elvis Presley performance in front of your eyes. Indeed, the next moments in our technological evolution promise to turn a host of popular science-fiction concepts into science facts: driverless cars, thought-controlled robotic motion, artificial intelligence (AI) and fully integrated augmented reality, which promises a visual overlay of digital information onto our physical environment. Such developments will join with and enhance elements of our natural world. This is our future, and these remarkable things are already beginning to take shape. That is what makes working in the technology industry so exciting today. It’s not just because we have a chance to invent and build amazing new devices or because of the scale of technological and intellectual challenges we will try to conquer; it’s because of what these developments will mean for the world.

We've been here three days already, and I've yet to cook a single meal. The night we arrived, my dad ordered Chinese takeout from the old Cantonese restaurant around the corner, where they still serve the best egg foo yung, light and fluffy and swimming in rich, brown gravy. Then there had been Mineo's pizza and corned beef sandwiches from the kosher deli on Murray, all my childhood favorites. But last night I'd fallen asleep reading Arthur Schwartz's Naples at Table and had dreamed of pizza rustica, so when I awoke early on Saturday morning with a powerful craving for Italian peasant food, I decided to go shopping. Besides, I don't ever really feel at home anywhere until I've cooked a meal. The Strip is down by the Allegheny River, a five- or six-block stretch filled with produce markets, old-fashioned butcher shops, fishmongers, cheese shops, flower stalls, and a shop that sells coffee that's been roasted on the premises. It used to be, and perhaps still is, where chefs pick up their produce and order cheeses, meats, and fish. The side streets and alleys are littered with moldering vegetables, fruits, and discarded lettuce leaves, and the smell in places is vaguely unpleasant. There are lots of beautiful, old warehouse buildings, brick with lovely arched windows, some of which are now, to my surprise, being converted into trendy loft apartments. If you're a restaurateur you get here early, four or five in the morning. Around seven or eight o'clock, home cooks, tourists, and various passers-through begin to clog the Strip, aggressively vying for the precious few available parking spaces, not to mention tables at Pamela's, a retro diner that serves the best hotcakes in Pittsburgh. On weekends, street vendors crowd the sidewalks, selling beaded necklaces, used CDs, bandanas in exotic colors, cheap, plastic running shoes, and Steelers paraphernalia by the ton. It's a loud, jostling, carnivalesque experience and one of the best things about Pittsburgh. There's even a bakery called Bruno's that sells only biscotti- at least fifteen different varieties daily. Bruno used to be an accountant until he retired from Mellon Bank at the age of sixty-five to bake biscotti full-time. There's a little hand-scrawled sign in the front of window that says, GET IN HERE! You can't pass it without smiling. It's a little after eight when Chloe and I finish up at the Pennsylvania Macaroni Company where, in addition to the prosciutto, soppressata, both hot and sweet sausages, fresh ricotta, mozzarella, and imported Parmigiano Reggiano, all essential ingredients for pizza rustica, I've also picked up a couple of cans of San Marzano tomatoes, which I happily note are thirty-nine cents cheaper here than in New York.

What are the great poetical names of the last hundred years or so? Coleridge, Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, Landor, Keats, Tennyson, Browning, Arnold, Morris, Rossetti, Swinburne—we may stop there. Of these, all but Keats, Browning, Rossetti were University men, and of these three, Keats, who died young, cut off in his prime, was the only one not fairly well to do. It may seem a brutal thing to say, and it is a sad thing to say: but, as a matter of hard fact, the theory that poetical genius bloweth where it listeth, and equally in poor and rich, holds little truth. As a matter of hard fact, nine out of those twelve were University men: which means that somehow or other they procured the means to get the best education England can give. As a matter of hard fact, of the remaining three you know that Browning was well to do, and I challenge you that, if he had not been well to do, he would no more have attained to write Saul or The Ring and the Book than Ruskin would have attained to writing Modern Painters if his father had not dealt prosperously in business. Rossetti had a small private income; and, moreover, he painted. There remains but Keats; whom Atropos slew young, as she slew John Clare in a mad-house, and James Thomson by the laudanum he took to drug disappointment. These are dreadful facts, but let us face them. It is—however dishonouring to us as a nation—certain that, by some fault in our commonwealth, the poor poet has not in these days, nor has had for two hundred years, a dog’s chance. Believe me—and I have spent a great part of ten years in watching some three hundred and twenty elementary schools, we may prate of democracy, but actually, a poor child in England has little more hope than had the son of an Athenian slave to be emancipated into that intellectual freedom of which great writings are born.’ (cit. The Art of Writing, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch) Nobody could put the point more plainly. ‘The poor poet has not in these days, nor has had for two hundred years, a dog’s chance . . . a poor child in England has little more hope than had the son of an Athenian slave to be emancipated into that intellectual freedom of which great writings are born.’ That is it. Intellectual freedom depends upon material things. Poetry depends upon intellectual freedom. And women have always been poor, not for two hundred years merely, but from the beginning of time. Women have had less intellectual freedom than the sons of Athenian slaves. Women, then, have not had a dog’s chance of writing poetry. That is why I have laid so much stress on money and a room of one’s own. However, thanks to the toils of those obscure women in the past, of whom I wish we knew more, thanks, curiously enough to two wars, the Crimean which let Florence Nightingale out of her drawing-room, and the European War which opened the doors to the average woman some sixty years later, these evils are in the way to be bettered. Otherwise you would not be here tonight, and your chance of earning five hundred pounds a year, precarious as I am afraid that it still is, would be minute in the extreme.