Street Code Quotes

Pop and metal aren't friends. Each knows exactly where the other lives and tries to keep its distance. They choose different streets, neighborhoods, zip codes.

I couldn't have made a better shot, if I had been one of those detectives who see a chap walking along the street and deduce that he is a retired manufacturer of poppet valves named Robinson with rheumatism in one arm, living at Clapham.

The [Motion Picture Production Code] took effect on March 31, 1930, 5 months too late to prevent the Wall Street Crash, but early enough to keep The Sixties from happening until approximately 1964. (When America fell victim to the British Invasion).

Religion, a mediaeval form of unreason, when combined with modern weaponry becomes a real threat to our freedoms. This religious totalitarianism has caused a deadly mutation in the heart of Islam and we see the tragic consequences in Paris today. I stand with Charlie Hebdo, as we all must, to defend the art of satire, which has always been a force for liberty and against tyranny, dishonesty and stupidity. ‘Respect for religion’ has become a code phrase meaning ‘fear of religion.’ Religions, like all other ideas, deserve criticism, satire, and, yes, our fearless disrespect." [I Stand With Charlie Hebdo, as We All Must (Wall Street Journal, January 7, 2015)]

It keeps strays in the flock. To word it differently: 'You must live up to the popular code if you believe in it; but if you don't believe in it, then you MUST live up to it!

I had been in France less than 48 hours before that obliging agent of yours had to stop me being run over by a French van full of French chickens because I’d looked the wrong way before crossing the street. Which shows how cunning the Gestapo are. “This person I’ve pulled from beneath the wheels of certain death was expecting traffic to travel on the left side of the road. Therefore she must be British, and is likely to have parachuted into Nazi-occupied France out of an Allied plane. I shall now arrest her as a spy.

That's basically the gangster code. Just be yourself. Just be you, dog. The easiest way to get your card plucked around a gangster is to be a fake. If we feel like you're trying too hard, if you're trying to act like you're from the street, you're in trouble.

And the strange thing was he had never loved her more than in that moment, because at that moment she had become himself. But thats not love, he thought, thats not what she wants, not what any of them want, they do not want you to find yourself in them, they want instead that you should lose yourself in them. And yet, he thought, they are always trying to find themselves in you. [...] And it seemed to him then that every human was always looking for himself, in bars, in railway trains, in offices, in mirrors, in love, especially in love, for the self of him that is there, someplace, in every other human. Love was not to give oneself, but find oneself, describe oneself. And that the whole conception had been written wrong. Because the only part of any man that he can ever touch or understand is that part of himself he recognises in him. And that he is always looking for the way in which he can expose his sealed bee cell and reach the other airtight cells with which he is connected in the waxy comb. And the only way he had ever found, the only code, the only language by which he could speak and be heard by other men, could communicate himself, was with a bugle. If you had a bugle here, he told himself, you could speak to her and be understood, you could play Fatigue Call for her, with its tiredness, its heavy belly going out to sweep somebody else's streets when it would rather stay home and sleep, she would understand it then. But you havent got a bugle, himself said, not here nor any other place. Your tongue has been ripped out. All you got is two bottles, one nearly full, one nearly empty.

I have never been one of those people—I know you aren’t, either—who feels that the love one has for a child is somehow a superior love, one more meaningful, more significant, and grander than any other. I didn’t feel that before Jacob, and I didn’t feel that after. But it is a singular love, because it is a love whose foundation is not physical attraction, or pleasure, or intellect, but fear. You have never known fear until you have a child, and maybe that is what tricks us into thinking that it is more magnificent, because the fear itself is more magnificent. Every day, your first thought is not “I love him” but “How is he?” The world, overnight, rearranges itself into an obstacle course of terrors. I would hold him in my arms and wait to cross the street and would think how absurd it was that my child, that any child, could expect to survive this life. It seemed as improbable as the survival of one of those late-spring butterflies—you know, those little white ones—I sometimes saw wobbling through the air, always just millimeters away from smacking itself against a windshield. And let me tell you two other things I learned. The first is that it doesn’t matter how old that child is, or when or how he became yours. Once you decide to think of someone as your child, something changes, and everything you have previously enjoyed about them, everything you have previously felt for them, is preceded first by that fear. It’s not biological; it’s something extra-biological, less a determination to ensure the survival of one’s genetic code, and more a desire to prove oneself inviolable to the universe’s feints and challenges, to triumph over the things that want to destroy what’s yours. The second thing is this: when your child dies, you feel everything you’d expect to feel, feelings so well-documented by so many others that I won’t even bother to list them here, except to say that everything that’s written about mourning is all the same, and it’s all the same for a reason—because there is no real deviation from the text. Sometimes you feel more of one thing and less of another, and sometimes you feel them out of order, and sometimes you feel them for a longer time or a shorter time. But the sensations are always the same. But here’s what no one says—when it’s your child, a part of you, a very tiny but nonetheless unignorable part of you, also feels relief. Because finally, the moment you have been expecting, been dreading, been preparing yourself for since the day you became a parent, has come. Ah, you tell yourself, it’s arrived. Here it is. And after that, you have nothing to fear again.

Cobblestone streets are coded into the genetic material of the western definition of romance,” she says coolly.

Remember when being a villain was all about wild nights and brawls in the street?

If you’re in a street fight, you don’t go after a man’s ball sack. Respect the street code.

What is a Gallagher Girl?” Liz asked. She looked nervously down at the papers in her hand even though I knew for a fact she had memorized every word. “When I was eleven I thought I knew the answer to that question. That was when the recruiters came to see me. They showed me brochures and told me they were impressed by my test scores and asked if I was ready to be challenged. And I said yes. Because that was what a Gallagher Girl was to me then, a student at the toughest school in the world.” She took a deep breath and talked on. “What is a Gallagher Girl?” Liz asked again. “When I was thirteen I thought I knew the answer to that question. That was when Dr. Fibs allowed me to start doing my own experiments in the lab. I could go anywhere—make anything. Do anything my mind could dream up. Because I was a Gallagher Girl. And, to me, that meant I was the future.” Liz took another deep breath. “What is a Gallagher Girl?” This time, when Liz asked it, her voice cracked. “When I was seventeen I stood on a dark street in Washington, D.C., and watched one Gallagher Girl literally jump in front of a bullet to save the life of another. I saw a group of women gather around a girl whom they had never met, telling the world that if any harm was to come to their sister, it had to go through them first.” Liz straightened. She no longer had to look down at her paper as she said, “What is a Gallagher Girl? I’m eighteen now, and if I’ve learned anything, it’s that I don’t really know the answer to that question. Maybe she is destined to be our first international graduate and take her rightful place among Her Majesty’s Secret Service with MI6.” I glanced to my right and, call me crazy, but I could have sworn Rebecca Baxter was crying. “Maybe she is someone who chooses to give back, to serve her life protecting others just as someone once protected her.” Macey smirked but didn’t cry. I got the feeling that Macey McHenry might never cry again. “Who knows?” Liz asked. “Maybe she’s an undercover journalist.” I glanced at Tina Walters. “An FBI agent.” Eva Alvarez beamed. “A code breaker.” Kim Lee smiled. “A queen.” I thought of little Amirah and knew somehow that she’d be okay. “Maybe she’s even a college student.” Liz looked right at me. “Or maybe she’s so much more.” Then Liz went quiet for a moment. She too looked up at the place where the mansion used to stand. “You know, there was a time when I thought that the Gallagher Academy was made of stone and wood, Grand Halls and high-tech labs. When I thought it was bulletproof, hack-proof, and…yes…fireproof. And I stand before you today happy for the reminder that none of those things are true. Yes, I really am. Because I know now that a Gallagher Girl is not someone who draws her power from that building. I know now with scientific certainty that it is the other way around.” A hushed awe descended over the already quiet crowd as she said this. Maybe it was the gravity of her words and what they meant, but for me personally, I like to think it was Gilly looking down, smiling at us all. “What is a Gallagher Girl?” Liz asked one final time. “She’s a genius, a scientist, a heroine, a spy. And now we are at the end of our time at school, and the one thing I know for certain is this: A Gallagher Girl is whatever she wants to be.” Thunderous, raucous applause filled the student section. Liz smiled and wiped her eyes. She leaned close to the microphone. “And, most of all, she is my sister.

Roarke didn't quite make it to Eve's office. He found her down the corridor, in front of one of the vending machines. She and the machine appeared to be in the middle of a vicious argument. "I put the proper credits in, you blood-sucking, money-grubbing son of a bitch." Eve punctuated this by slamming her fist where the machine's heart would be, if it had one. ANY ATTEMPT TO VANDALIZE, DEFACE, OR DAMAGE THIS UNIT IS A CRIMINAL OFFENSE. The machine spoke in a prissy, singsong voice Roarke was certain was sending his wife's blood pressure through the roof. THIS UNIT IS EQUIPPED WITH SCANEYE, AND HAS RECORDED YOUR BADGE NUMBER. DALLAS, LIEUTENANT EVE. PLEASE INSERT PROPER CREDIT, IN COIN OR CREDIT CODE, FOR YOUR SELECTION. AND REFRAIN FROM ATTEMPTING TO VANDALIZE, DEFACE, OR DAMAGE THIS UNIT. "Okay, I'll stop attempting to vandalize, deface, or damage you, you electronic street thief. I'll just do it." She swung back her right foot, which Roarke had cause to know could deliver a paralyzing kick from a standing position. But before she could follow through he stepped up and nudged her off balance. "Please, allow me, Lieutenant." "Don't put any more credits in that thieving bastard," she began, then hissed when Roarke did just that. "Candy bar, I assume. Did you have any lunch?" "Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know it's just going to keep stealing if people like you pander to it." "Eve, darling, it's a machine. It does not think." "Ever hear of artificial intelligence, ace?" "Not in a vending machine that dispenses chocolate bars.

In India we're fighting to retain a wilderness that we have. Whereas in the west, it's gone. Every person that's walking down the street is a walking bar code. You can tell where their clothes are from, how much they cost, which designer made which shoe, which shop you bought each item from. Everything is civilized and tagged and valued and numbered and put in it's place. Whereas in India, the wilderness still exists-the unindoctrinated wilderness of the mind, full of untold secrets and wild imaginings.

The trick was not simply to write the code that turned information into pictures but to find the best pictures to draw—shapes and colors that led the mind to meaning.

But the streets aren't black and white. Despite the many ironclad codes, the streets function off of one element that the media can't understand: circumstance.

One [project of Teddy Cruz's] is titled Living Rooms at the Border. it takes a piece of land with an unused church zoned for three units and carefully arrays on it twelve affordable housing units, a community center (the converted church), offices for Casa in the church's attic, and a garden that can accommodate street markets and kiosks. 'In a place where current regulation allows only one use,' [Cruz} crows, ' we propose five different uses that support each other. This suggests a model of social sustainability for San Diego, one that conveys density not as bulk but as social choreography.' For both architect and patron, it's an exciting opportunity to prove that breaking the zoning codes can be for the best. Another one of Cruz's core beliefs is that if architects are going to achieve anything of social distinction, they will have to become developers' collaborators or developers themselves, rather than hirelings brought in after a project's parameters are laid out.

Billy's native arrogance might well have been a gift of miffed genes, then come to splendid definition through the tests to which a street like Broadway puts a young man on the make: tests designed to refine a breed, enforce a code, exclude all simps and gumps, and deliver into the city's life a man worthy of functioning in this age of nocturnal supremacy. Men like Billy Phelan, forged in the brass of Broadway, send, in the time of their splendor, telegraphic statements of mission: I, you bums, am a winner. And that message, however devoid of Christ-like other-cheekery, dooms the faint-hearted Scottys of the night, who must sludge along, never knowing how it feels to spill over with the small change of sassiness, how it feels to leave the spillover on the floor, more where that came from, pal. Leave it for the sweeper.

...But although the rules are vague And widely disregarded now Some precepts remain: live with love - That is a rule we all can understand; Forgive those who need forgiveness, Which I think is everybody, more or less; Be kind - that, perhaps, is first and foremost In any postmodern, new-fangled Code we devise for ourselves; Yes, be kind: love one another, And most of all tend with gentleness The small patch of terra firma That is allocated to each of us...

But it is a singular love, because it is a love whose foundation is not physical attraction, or pleasure, or intellect, but fear. You have never known fear until you have a child, and maybe that is what tricks us into thinking that it is more magnificent, because the fear itself is more magnificent. Every day, your first thought is not “I love him” but “How is he?” The world, overnight, rearranges itself into an obstacle course of terrors. I would hold him in my arms and wait to cross the street and would think how absurd it was that my child, that any child, could expect to survive this life. It seemed as improbable as the survival of one of those late-spring butterflies—you know, those little white ones—I sometimes saw wobbling through the air, always just millimeters away from smacking itself against a windshield. And let me tell you two other things I learned. The first is that it doesn’t matter how old that child is, or when or how he became yours. Once you decide to think of someone as your child, something changes, and everything you have previously enjoyed about them, everything you have previously felt for them, is preceded first by that fear. It’s not biological; it’s something extra-biological, less a determination to ensure the survival of one’s genetic code, and more a desire to prove oneself inviolable to the universe’s feints and challenges, to triumph over the things that want to destroy what’s yours. The second thing is this: when your child dies, you feel everything you’d expect to feel, feelings so well-documented by so many others that I won’t even bother to list them here, except to say that everything that’s written about mourning is all the same, and it’s all the same for a reason—because there is no real deviation from the text. Sometimes you feel more of one thing and less of another, and sometimes you feel them out of order, and sometimes you feel them for a longer time or a shorter time. But the sensations are always the same. But here’s what no one says—when it’s your child, a part of you, a very tiny but nonetheless unignorable part of you, also feels relief. Because finally, the moment you have been expecting, been dreading, been preparing yourself for since the day you became a parent, has come. Ah, you tell yourself, it’s arrived. Here it is. And after that, you have nothing to fear again.

This city was our common ground, I want to tell Kaiz. Not simply its soil, nor its salt or tides, not lines on any map, nor buildings and streets. Something else entirely. An image, a dream, an idea that beguiled both of us: a magical place with chaos in its code, where our stories collided briefly. That romance with the city he carries with him wherever he goes. What it means to me, though, goes beyond what we had in common, it can’t be packed up and transported tidily. Mumbai for me is two people who moved from small coastal towns to this metropolis by the sea and made it their home. My home. And that is how the city is different for the two of us: for him both Mumbai and home were abstractions. Abstractions are at once more fragile and more hardy than reality.

Actually, using the Daleks would be a masterstroke. Everyone loves Doctor Who - who wouldn't be thrilled by the sight of a real-life Dalek squadron rolling down the high street, glinting in the sun? The sheer excitement would genuinely make the accompanying loss of liberty seem worthwhile. To liven things up even more, our rasping pepperpot overlords would be colour-coded. Blue Daleks would deal with minor infractions, and would spend most of their time issuing warnings and administering minor shocks - but they'd also be chummy and approachable, and willing to pose for photographs with your nephew. Red Daleks, on the other hand, would be emotionless killing machines. Imagine the atmosphere outside a pub on a hot summer's day: a Red Dalek trundles past, and the convivial hubbub suddenly fades to a whisper. Everyone stiffens. And then he turns the corner and a communal sigh of relief goes up, and the drinking continues and the jukebox plays louder and louder... community spirit lives again. Admit it: it'd be fantastic.

New Rule: Republicans must stop pitting the American people against the government. Last week, we heard a speech from Republican leader Bobby Jindal--and he began it with the story that every immigrant tells about going to an American grocery store for the first time and being overwhelmed with the "endless variety on the shelves." And this was just a 7-Eleven--wait till he sees a Safeway. The thing is, that "endless variety"exists only because Americans pay taxes to a government, which maintains roads, irrigates fields, oversees the electrical grid, and everything else that enables the modern American supermarket to carry forty-seven varieties of frozen breakfast pastry.Of course, it's easy to tear government down--Ronald Reagan used to say the nine most terrifying words in the Englishlanguage were "I'm from the government and I'm here to help." But that was before "I'm Sarah Palin, now show me the launch codes."The stimulus package was attacked as typical "tax and spend"--like repairing bridges is left-wing stuff. "There the liberals go again, always wanting to get across the river." Folks, the people are the government--the first responders who put out fires--that's your government. The ranger who shoos pedophiles out of the park restroom, the postman who delivers your porn.How stupid is it when people say, "That's all we need: the federal government telling Detroit how to make cars or Wells Fargo how to run a bank. You want them to look like the post office?"You mean the place that takes a note that's in my hand in L.A. on Monday and gives it to my sister in New Jersey on Wednesday, for 44 cents? Let me be the first to say, I would be thrilled if America's health-care system was anywhere near as functional as the post office.Truth is, recent years have made me much more wary of government stepping aside and letting unregulated private enterprise run things it plainly is too greedy to trust with. Like Wall Street. Like rebuilding Iraq.Like the way Republicans always frame the health-care debate by saying, "Health-care decisions should be made by doctors and patients, not government bureaucrats," leaving out the fact that health-care decisions aren't made by doctors, patients, or bureaucrats; they're made by insurance companies. Which are a lot like hospital gowns--chances are your gas isn't covered.

The next day they had lunch, followed by a stroll along the cobblestone streets of old San Juan. When the discussion turned to Cas9, Charpentier became excited. “We have to figure out exactly how it works,” she urged Doudna. “What’s the exact mechanism it uses to cut DNA?

Men like Rust had a moral code of sorts, and some things weren’t honorable. You could own a street of crowded houses where people lived like cockroaches and the cockroaches lived like kings and that was perfectly okay, but Rust would probably die before he’d descend to forgery.

Don’t you ever read the papers? Roderick Spode is the founder and head of the Saviours of Britain, a Fascist organization better known as the Black Shorts. His general idea, if he doesn’t get knocked on the head with a bottle in one of the frequent brawls in which he and his followers indulge, is to make himself a Dictator.’ ‘Well, I’m blowed!’ I was astounded at my keenness of perception. The moment I had set eyes on Spode, if you remember, I had said to myself ‘What ho! A Dictator!’ and a Dictator he had proved to be. I couldn’t have made a better shot, if I had been one of those detectives who see a chap walking along the street and deduce that he is a retired manufacturer of poppet valves named Robinson with rheumatism in one arm, living at Clapham. ‘Well, I’m dashed! I thought he was something of that sort. That chin…Those eyes…And, for the matter of that, that moustache. By the way, when you say “shorts”, you mean “shirts”, of course.’ ‘No. By the time Spode formed his association, there were no shirts left. He and his adherents wear black shorts.’ ‘Footer bags, you mean?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘How perfectly foul.

By 2200 B.C.E., five hundred years before Hammurabi issued his law code in Babylon, the civilization of the Indus Valley was a flourishing urban world of small brick houses and straight narrow streets, clean, efficient, and uniform, ruled by all-powerful theocrats whose temples were the very cities themselves.14

You have never known fear until you have a child, and maybe that is what tricks us into thinking it is more magnificent, because the fear itself is more magnificent. Every day, your first thought is not "I love him" but "How is he?" The world, overnight, rearranges itself into an obstacle course of terrors. I would hold him in my arms and wait to cross the street and would think how absurd it was that my child, that any child, could expect to survive this life... It doesn't matter how old that child is, or when or how he became yours. Once you decide to think of someone as your child, something changes, and everything you have previously enjoyed about them, everything you have previously felt for them, is preceded first by that fear. It's not biological; it's something extra-biological, less a determination to ensure the survival of one's genetic code, and more a desire to prove oneself inviolable to the universe's feints and challenges, to triumph over the things that want to destroy what's yours.

Much of what it takes to succeed in school, at work, and in one’s community consists of cultural habits acquired by adaptation to the social environment. Such cultural adaptations are known as “cultural capital.” Segregation leads social groups to form different codes of conduct and communication. Some habits that help individuals in intensely segregated, disadvantaged environments undermine their ability to succeed in integrated, more advantaged environments. At Strive, a job training organization, Gyasi Headen teaches young black and Latino men how to drop their “game face” at work. The “game face” is the angry, menacing demeanor these men adopt to ward off attacks in their crime-ridden, segregated neighborhoods. As one trainee described it, it is the face you wear “at 12 o’clock at night, you’re in the ‘hood and they’re going to try to get you.”102 But the habit may freeze it into place, frightening people from outside the ghetto, who mistake the defensive posture for an aggressive one. It may be so entrenched that black men may be unaware that they are glowering at others. This reduces their chance of getting hired. The “game face” is a form of cultural capital that circulates in segregated underclass communities, helping its members survive. Outside these communities, it burdens its possessors with severe disadvantages. Urban ethnographer Elijah Anderson highlights the cruel dilemma this poses for ghetto residents who aspire to mainstream values and seek responsible positions in mainstream society.103 If they manifest their “decent” values in their neighborhoods, they become targets for merciless harassment by those committed to “street” values, who win esteem from their peers by demonstrating their ability and willingness to insult and physically intimidate others with impunity. To protect themselves against their tormentors, and to gain esteem among their peers, they adopt the game face, wear “gangster” clothing, and engage in the posturing style that signals that they are “bad.” This survival strategy makes them pariahs in the wider community. Police target them for questioning, searches, and arrests.104 Store owners refuse to serve them, or serve them brusquely, while shadowing them to make sure they are not shoplifting. Employers refuse to employ them.105 Or they employ them in inferior, segregated jobs. A restaurant owner may hire blacks as dishwashers, but not as wait staff, where they could earn tips.

So we call upon the author to explain (Doop doop doop doop dooop) Our myxomatoid kids spraddle the streets, we've shunned them from the greasy-grind The poor little things, they look so sad and old as they mount us from behind I ask them to desist and to refrain And then we call upon the author to explain (Doop doop doop doop dooop)Rosary clutched in his hand, he died with tubes up his nose And a cabal of angels with finger cymbals chanted his name in code We shook our fists at the punishing rain And we call upon the author to explain (Doop doop doop doop dooop) He said everything is messed up around here, everything is banal and jejune There is a planetary conspiracy against the likes of you and me in this idiot constituency of the moon Well, he knew exactly who to blame And we call upon the author to explain (Doop doop doop doop dooop) Prolix! Prolix! Nothing a pair of scissors can't fix! Prolix! Prolix! Nothing a pair of scissors can't fix!(Doop doop doop doop dooop) Well, I go guruing down the street, young people gather round my feet Ask me things, but I don't know where to start They ignite the power-trail ssstraight to my father's heart And once again I call upon the author to explain (Doop doop doop doop dooop ...)We call upon the author to explain Who is this great burdensome slavering dog-thing that mediocres my every thought? I feel like a vacuum cleaner, a complete sucker, it's fucked up and he is a fucker But what an enormous and encyclopaedic brain I call upon the author to explain (Doop doop doop doop dooop ...) Oh rampant discrimination, mass poverty, third world debt, infectious diseease Global inequality and deepening socio-economic divisions Well, it does in your brain And we call upon the author to explain (Doop doop doop doop dooop ...) Now hang on, my friend Doug is tapping on the window (Hey Doug, how you been?) Brings me back a book on holocaust poetry complete with pictures Then tells me to get ready for the rain And we call upon the author to explain (Doop doop doop doop dooop ...) I say prolix! Prolix! Something a pair of scissors can fix Bukowski was a jerk! Berryman was best! He wrote like wet papier mache, went the Heming-way weirdly on wings and with maximum pain We call upon the author to explain (Doop doop doop doop dooop ...) Down in my bolthole I see they've published another volume of unreconstructed rubbish "The waves, the waves were soldiers moving". Well, thank you, thank you, thank you And again I call upon the author to explain Yeah, we call upon the author to explain Prolix! Prolix! There's nothing a pair of scissors can't fix!

Telegraph Road A long time ago came a man on a track Walking thirty miles with a pack on his back And he put down his load where he thought it was the best Made a home in the wilderness He built a cabin and a winter store And he ploughed up the ground by the cold lake shore And the other travellers came riding down the track And they never went further, no, they never went back Then came the churches, then came the schools Then came the lawyers, then came the rules Then came the trains and the trucks with their loads And the dirty old track was the telegraph road Then came the mines - then came the ore Then there was the hard times, then there was a war Telegraph sang a song about the world outside Telegraph road got so deep and so wide Like a rolling river ... And my radio says tonight it's gonna freeze People driving home from the factories There's six lanes of traffic Three lanes moving slow ... I used to like to go to work but they shut it down I got a right to go to work but there's no work here to be found Yes and they say we're gonna have to pay what's owed We're gonna have to reap from some seed that's been sowed And the birds up on the wires and the telegraph poles They can always fly away from this rain and this cold You can hear them singing out their telegraph code All the way down the telegraph road You know I'd sooner forget but I remember those nights When life was just a bet on a race between the lights You had your head on my shoulder, you had your hand in my hair Now you act a little colder like you don't seem to care But believe in me baby and I'll take you away From out of this darkness and into the day From these rivers of headlights, these rivers of rain From the anger that lives on the streets with these names 'Cos I've run every red light on memory lane I've seen desperation explode into flames And I don't want to see it again ... From all of these signs saying sorry but we're closed All the way down the telegraph road

I have never been one of those people...who feels that the love one has for a child is somehow a superior love, one more meaningful, more significant, and grander than any other...But it is a singular love, because it it a love whose foundation is not physical attraction, or pleasure, or intellect, but fear. You have never known fear until you have a child, and maybe that is what tricks us into thinking that it is more magnificent, because the fear itself is more magnificent. Every day, your first thought is not "I love him" but "How Is he?" The world, overnight, rearranges itself into an obstacle course of terrors. I would hold him in my arms and wait to cross the street and would think how absurd it was that my child, that any child, could expect to survive this life...Once you decide to think of someone as your child, something changes, and everything you have previously enjoyed about them, everything you have previously felt for them, is preceded first by that fear. It's not biological; it's something extra-biological, less a determination to ensure the survival of one's genetic code, and more a desire to prove oneself inviolable to the universe's feints and challenges, to triumph over the things that want to destroy what's yours.

That huge old house, which had an entrance on two streets, was one-story tall with a mansard roof, and it harbored a tribe of great-grandparents, maiden aunts, cousins, servants, poor relatives, and guests who became permanent residents; no one tried to throw them out because in Chile “visitors” are protected by the sacred code of hospitality. There was also an occasional ghost of dubious authenticity, always in plentiful supply in my family.

Scrooge instituted the initiation process for new members, as a way of weeding out those who were not ready. This was primarily done to toughen fellas up, for when they ended up in the hands of the police. We were having experiences where gang members who were being locked up couldn’t handle pressure. The next thing you know, they were pulling right up in the front of your door with the police. Franco ‘Co’ Bethel, former gang leader and right hand man to Scrooge.

A piece of plastic stole an entire species— In lobbies, in the bathroom, in an elevator, Ideas, reactions, and silent contemplations, During lunchtime, during mass, during his funeral, On the street, on break, on duty, Before the waiter brings the food and after the check, While the flight attendant bothers to request airplane mode, While a trafficked victim speaks to you in code, While the potential love of our life just walked past, While mother cooks with a recipe we forgot to ask.

Imagine teaching a fifteen-year-old how to drive a car with manual transmission. First, you have to press down the clutch. Then you have to whisper a secret into one of the cup holders. In Diane’s case, this was easy, as she was not a very social or public person, and most any mundane thing in her life could be a secret. In Josh’s case this was hard, because for teenagers most every mundane thing in their lives is a secret that they do not like sharing in front of their parents. Then, after the clutch and the secret, the driver has to grab the stick shift, which is a splintered wood stake wedged into the dashboard, and shake it until something happens—anything really—and then simultaneously type a series of code numbers into a keyboard on the steering wheel. All this while sunglasses-wearing agents from a vague yet menacing government agency sit in a heavily tinted black sedan across the street taking pictures (and occasionally waving). This is a lot of pressure on a first-time driver.

You have to respect a person for what he can do, and you can’t judge him to the fella who shoots ten people who feels nothing, goes to jail and come out and shoots ten more. You have to make people feel that whatever you are good at, we appreciate and respect you for that. Scrooge, former leader of the Rebellion Raiders street gang that once boasted of having some ten thousand members Respecting people, coaching, gang recruitment, gang membership, gang leaders, street code, street life, gang involvement, team members, self-esteem, self-confidence, feeling respected, feeling wanted, feeling good feeling apart, Rebellions-Raiders, Rebellion Raiders You have to respect a person for what he can do, and you can’t judge him to the fella who shoots ten people who feels nothing, goes to jail and come out and shoots ten more. You have to make people feel that whatever you are good at, we appreciate and respect you for that. Scrooge, former leader of the Rebellion Raiders street gang that once boasted of having some ten thousand members

Sophie’s brain darted to silly things like, Accio cache! Allons-y! Use the force! Bibbidy-Bobbidy-Boo! My preciousssssssssssssssssss. But then she remembered how when she was little and had moved to the “older kids’ school,” her parents gave her a code phrase to say if she ever wanted to be picked up and didn’t want anyone to know she’d called her parents. Her dad was a huge Sherlock Holmes fan, so he’d chosen “221B Baker Street.” She remembered complaining that no one could work those words into normal conversation, and her dad had just said, “But you’ll never forget them.

They came to Virginia City as soon as the true value of the Comstock was perceived. They constituted, no doubt, a deplorable source of gambling, pleasure and embroilment. They were not soft-spoken women, their desire was not visibly separate from the main chance, and they would have beheld Mr. Harte’s portrayal of them at Poker Flat with ribald mirth. But let them have a moment of respect. They civilized the Comstock. They drove through its streets reclining in lacquered broughams, displaying to male eyes fashions as close to Paris as any then current in New York. They were, in brick houses hung with tapestries, a glamour and a romance, after the superheated caverns of the mines. They enforced a code of behavior: one might be a hard-rock man outside their curtains but in their presence one was punctilious or one was hustled away. They brought Parisian cooking to the sagebrush of Sun Mountain and they taught the West to distinguish between tarantula juice and the bouquet of wines. An elegy for their passing. The West has neglected to mention them in bronze and its genealogies avoid comment on their marriages, conspicuous or obscure, but it owes them a here acknowledged debt for civilization.

There was a strength that ran in her, something he'd known in Night City and held there, been held by it, held for a while away from time and death, from the relentless Street that hunted them all. It was a place he'd known before; not everyone could take him there, and somehow he always managed to forget it. Something he'd found and lost so many times. It belonged, he knew - he remembered - as she pulled him down, to the meat, the flesh the cowboys mocked. It was a vast thing, beyond knowing, a sea of information coded in spiral and pheromone, infinite intricacy that only the body, in its strong blind way, could ever read.

And now?[...]The printed word? The book trade, that old carcass tossed here and there by its ravenous jackals? Greedy authors, greedy agents, brainless book chains with their Vivaldi-riddled espresso bars, publishers owned by metallurgy conglomerates[...]And meanwhile language, the human languages we all must use, no longer degraded by the barking murderous coinages of Goebbels and the numskull doublespeak of bureaucratic Communism, is becoming the mellifluous happy-talk of Microsoft and Honda, corporate conspiracies that would turn the world into one big pinball game for child-brained consumers. Is the gorgeous, fork-tongued, edgy English of Shakespeare and Gerard Manley Hopkins, of Charles Dickens and Saul Bellow becoming the binary code for a gray-suited empire directed by men walking along the streets of Manhattan and Hong Kong jabbering into cell phones?

I am an urchin, standing in the cold, elbowed aside by the glossy rich visitors in their fur coats and ostentatious jewellery, being fussed into the hotel by pompous-looking doormen. 'No problem. I'd better get home, actually Mr – Gustav. A drink is very tempting, but maybe not such a good idea after all.' I pat my pockets. 'And I'm skint.' 'Pavements not paved with gold yet, eh?' He moves on along the facade of the grand hotel to the corner, and waits. He's staring not back at me but down St James Street. I wage a little war with myself. He's a stranger, remember. The newspaper headlines, exaggerated by the time they reach the office of Jake's local rag: Country girl from the sticks raped and murdered in London by suave conman. Even Poppy would be wagging her metaphorical finger at me by now. Blaming herself for not being there, looking out for me. But we're out in public here. Lots of people around us. He's charming. He's incredibly attractive. He's got a lovely deep, well spoken voice. And he's an entrepreneur who must be bloody rich if he owns more than one house. What the hell else am I going to do with myself when everyone else is out having fun? One thing I won't tell him is that my pockets might be empty, but my bank account is full. 'One drink. Then I must get back.' He doesn't answer or protest, but with a courtly bow he crooks his elbow and escorts me down St James. We turn right and into the far more subtle splendour of Dukes Hotel. 'Dress code?' I ask nervously, wiping my feet obediently on the huge but welcoming doormat and drifting ahead of him into the smart interior where domed and glassed corridors lead here and there. The foyer smells of mulled wine and candles and entices you to succumb to its perfumed embrace.

In heist movies, there's always a montage of scenes where the caper crew rehearses for the big day. The greaser person practices maneuvering through a mock laser beam field made up of string. The driver races through obstacle courses, back alleys, and dark city streets. The hacker pounds on her keyboard, staring at screens full of code. The gadget person demonstrates all their clever toys. The key master practices opening a safe. The muscle finds a few security guards to knock unconscious and wrestles guard dogs to the ground. The inside person seduces or befriends the target and gets them to spill their secrets. And the leader organizes it all with the help of her second-in-command. At least, that's the way it works in the movies. In real life, with a bunch of newbs who are scraping by with low-paying jobs, inflexible hours, difficult bosses, and a bunch of side gigs to make ends meet, just organizing a rehearsal heist was one hell of a task.

But as I reflected on what the president could have done or said differently, I also remembered what it felt like in the weeks following 9/11. When, for a few glorious weeks, we were all united as Americans. For a brief time, it didn’t seem to matter if you were black, white, or brown. We were all brothers and sisters because we were Americans. We shared certain values, a certain past, a certain goal. We haven’t really seen that since. Charlottesville, I knew, had the same potential to unite us. But Trump’s response derailed that opportunity. America didn’t need a stock statement. The country was pleading for a serious discussion about race, about our fundamental need to completely stamp out the Klan and neo-Nazis. I couldn’t help but think of the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing and the Charleston church shooting. Emmett Till and Jimmie Lee Jackson. Black Codes and the Southern Manifesto. Trump, I felt, had betrayed black America. And Jewish America. And American decency.

After the plates are removed by the silent and swift waiting staff, General Çiller leans forward and says across the table to Güney, ‘What’s this I’m reading in Hürriyet about Strasbourg breaking up the nation?’ ‘It’s not breaking up the nation. It’s a French motion to implement European Regional Directive 8182 which calls for a Kurdish Regional Parliament.’ ‘And that’s not breaking up the nation?’ General Çiller throws up his hands in exasperation. He’s a big, square man, the model of the military, but he moves freely and lightly ‘The French prancing all over the legacy of Atatürk? What do you think, Mr Sarioğlu?’ The trap could not be any more obvious but Ayşe sees Adnan straighten his tie, the code for, Trust me, I know what I’m doing, ‘What I think about the legacy of Atatürk, General? Let it go. I don’t care. The age of Atatürk is over.’ Guests stiffen around the table, breath subtly indrawn; social gasps. This is heresy. People have been shot down in the streets of Istanbul for less. Adnan commands every eye. ‘Atatürk was father of the nation, unquestionably. No Atatürk, no Turkey. But, at some point every child has to leave his father. You have to stand on your own two feet and find out if you’re a man. We’re like kids that go on about how great their dads are; my dad’s the strongest, the best wrestler, the fastest driver, the biggest moustache. And when someone squares up to us, or calls us a name or even looks at us squinty, we run back shouting ‘I’ll get my dad, I’ll get my dad!’ At some point; we have to grow up. If you’ll pardon the expression, the balls have to drop. We talk the talk mighty fine: great nation, proud people, global union of the noble Turkic races, all that stuff. There’s no one like us for talking ourselves up. And then the EU says, All right, prove it. The door’s open, in you come; sit down, be one of us. Move out of the family home; move in with the other guys. Step out from the shadow of the Father of the Nation. ‘And do you know what the European Union shows us about ourselves? We’re all those things we say we are. They weren’t lies, they weren’t boasts. We’re good. We’re big. We’re a powerhouse. We’ve got an economy that goes all the way to the South China Sea. We’ve got energy and ideas and talent - look at the stuff that’s coming out of those tin-shed business parks in the nano sector and the synthetic biology start-ups. Turkish. All Turkish. That’s the legacy of Atatürk. It doesn’t matter if the Kurds have their own Parliament or the French make everyone stand in Taksim Square and apologize to the Armenians. We’re the legacy of Atatürk. Turkey is the people. Atatürk’s done his job. He can crumble into dust now. The kid’s come right. The kid’s come very right. That’s why I believe the EU’s the best thing that’s ever happened to us because it’s finally taught us how to be Turks.’ General Çiller beats a fist on the table, sending the cutlery leaping. ‘By God, by God; that’s a bold thing to say but you’re exactly right.

Very few entities are powerful enough to create Patinas, and those that can guard them closely. The library is here. But Arriane’s right. We’ll need to figure out the way in.” “I heard you need an Announcer to get through one,” Arriane said. “Cosmic legend.” Annabelle shook her head. “Every Patina is different. Access is entirely up to the creator. They program the code.” “I once heard Cam tell a story at a party about how he accessed a Patina,” Rolan said. “Or was that a story about a party that he threw in a Patina?” “Luce!” Daniel said suddenly, making all of them startle in midair. “It’s you. It was always you.” Luce shrugged. “Always me what?” “You’re the one who always rang the bell. You’re the one who had entry to the library. You just need to ring the bell.” Luce looked at the empty street, the fog tinting everything around them brown. “What are you talking about? What bell?” “Close your eyes,” Daniel said. “Remember it. Pass into the past and find the bellpull-“ Luce was already there, back at the library the last time she’d been in Vienna with Daniel. Her feet were firmly on the ground. It was raining and her hair splayed all across her face. Her crimson hair ribbons were soaked, but she didn’t care. She was looking for something. There was a short path up the courtyard, then a dark alcove outside the library. It had been cold outside, and a fire blazed within. There, in the musty corner near the door, was a woven cord embroidered with white peonies hanging from a substantial silver bell. She reached into the air and pulled. The angels gasped. Luce opened her eyes. There, in the center of the north side of the street, the row of contemporary town houses was interrupted at its midpoint by a single small brown house. A curl of smoke rose from its chimney. The only light-aside from the angel’s wings-was the dim yellow glow of a lamp on the sill of the house’s front window. The angels landed softly on the empty street and Daniel’s grip around Luce softened. He kissed her hand. “You remembered. Well done.

For the philosopher, the most interesting thing about fashion is its extraordinary anticipations. It is well known that art will often-for example, in pictures-precede the perceptible reality by years. It was possible to see streets or rooms that shone in all sorts of fiery colours long before technology, by means of illuminated signs and other arrangements, actually set them under such a light. Moreover, the sensitivity of the individual artist to what is to coming certainly far exceeds that of the grande dame. Yet fashion is in much steadier, much more precise contact with the coming thing, thanks to the incomparable nose which the feminine collective has for what lies waiting in the future. Each season brings, in its newest creations, various secret signals of things to come. Whoever understand how to read these semaphores would know in advance not only about new currents in the arts but also about new legal codes, wars and revolutions.-Here, surely lies the greatest charm of fashion, but also the difficulty of making the charming fruitful.

Not knowing what to do, I started walking down St. Mark’s toward Tompkins Square. All Day All Night. You Must Be Twenty One To Enter. Downtown, away from the high-rise press, the wind cut more bitterly and yet the sky was more open too, it was easier to breathe. Muscle guys walking paired pit bulls, inked-up Bettie Page girls in wiggle dresses, stumblebums with drag-hemmed pants and Jack O’Lantern teeth and taped-up shoes. Outside the shops, racks of sunglasses and skull bracelets and multicolored transvestite wigs. There was a needle exchange somewhere, maybe more than one but I wasn’t sure where; Wall Street guys bought off the street all the time if you believed what people said but I wasn’t wise enough to know where to go or who to approach, and besides who was going to sell to me, a stranger with horn rimmed glasses and an uptown haircut, dressed for picking out wedding china with Kitsey? Unsettled heart. The fetishism of secrecy. These people understood—as I did—the back alleys of the soul, whispers and shadows, money slipping from hand to hand, the password, the code, the second self, all the hidden consolations that lifted life above the ordinary and made it worth living.

Think of the many articles one can find every year in the Wall Street Journal describing some entrepreneur or businessman as being a "pioneer" or a "maverick" or a "cowboy." Think of the many times these ambitious modern men are described as "staking their claim" or boldly pushing themselves "beyond the frontier" or even "riding into the sunset." We still use this nineteenth-century lexicon to describe our boldest citizens, but it's really a code now, because these guys aren't actually pioneers; they are talented computer programmers, biogenetic researchers, politicians, or media monguls making a big splash in a fast modern economy. But when Eustace Conway talks about staking a claim, the guy is literally staking a goddamn claim. Other frontier expressions that the rest of us use as metaphors, Eustace uses literally. He does sit tall in the saddle; he does keep his powder dry; he is carving out a homestead. When he talks about reining in horses or calling off the dogs or mending fences, you can be sure that there are real horses, real dogs or real fences in the picture. And when Eustace goes in for the kill, he's not talking about a hostile takeover of a rival company; he's talking about really killing something.

On the other hand, some of the family’s impatience with the public is justified. When I use Federal Express, I accept as a condition of business that its standardized forms must be filled out in printed letters. An e-mail address off by a single character goes nowhere. Transposing two digits in a phone number gets me somebody speaking heatedly in Portuguese. Electronic media tell you instantly when you’ve made an error; with the post office, you have to wait. Haven’t we all at some point tested its humanity? I send mail to friends in Upper Molar, New York (they live in Upper Nyack), and expect a stranger to laugh and deliver it in forty-eight hours. More often than not, the stranger does. With its mission of universal service, the Postal Service is like an urban emergency room contractually obligated to accept every sore throat, pregnancy, and demented parent that comes its way. You may have to wait for hours in a dimly lit corridor. The staff may be short-tempered and dilatory. But eventually you will get treated. In the Central Post Office’s Nixie unit—where mail arrives that has been illegibly or incorrectly addressed—I see street numbers in the seventy thousands; impossible pairings of zip codes and streets; addresses without a name, without a street, without a city; addresses that consist of the description of a building; addresses written in water-based ink that rain has blurred. Skilled Nixie clerks study the orphans one at a time. Either they find a home for them or they apply that most expressive of postal markings, the vermilion finger of accusation that lays the blame squarely on you, the sender.

I had to drive through a very poor and largely Hispanic section of Miami to get to the apartment complex where Casey Martin had died. There were a lot of beautiful women on the sidewalks and at the outdoor cafés, a lot of tough guys and a lot of guys who weren’t tough but trying to look like they were. The streets were alive with what criminally passed for music nowadays, and there were smells of cooking in the air that suggested savory tastes. Small, hole-in-the-wall shops marked one end, and some more upscale stores the other. The dividing line between the two was discernible not just by the stores, but the women. The women and even younger girls at the lower income end seemed softer, friendlier, quicker with a genuine smile. The ones walking into the trendy places were just as pretty, more expensively dressed, but more apt to express scorn than produce a spontaneous smile. The upscale women appeared to be from a different planet. For them, everything was sexist, everything a slight. They were eternal victims, even though the entire world was in their favor. The women at the poor end fell in love, watched out for their men, while the more affluent were stand-offish and demanding, making certain any man “lucky” enough to be with them lived in the right zip code, had the right amount of bling to give them, and above all, had been properly neutered. The balls of their boyfriends and husbands — sometimes they had both — were always in their handbag, somewhere between the trendy lip liner and eye shadow. A kiss from one of the poor girls was a sweet gift, filled with passion and tenderness, even if it could only last a night. A kiss from an uptown girl meant you’d checked off all her right boxes, and she needed to fulfill her duty. Girls without money were from Venus, girls with money were from Mars.

The day-to-day horror of writing gave me a notion of tournament time. Writing novels is tedious. When will this book be finished, when will it reveal its bright and shining true self? it takes freakin’ years. At the poker table, you’re only playing a fraction of the hands, waiting for your shot. If you keep your wits, can keep from flying apart while those around you are self-destructing, devouring each other, you’re halfway there. … Let them flame out while you develop a new relationship with time, and they drift away from the table. 86-7 Coach Helen’s mantra: It’s OK to be scared, but don’t play scared. 90 [During a young adult trip to Los Vegas] I was contemplating the nickel in my hand. Before we pushed open the glass doors, what the heck, I dropped it into a one-armed bandit and won two dollars. In a dank utility room deep in the subbasements of my personality, a little man wiped his hands on his overalls and pulled the switch: More. Remembering it now, I hear a sizzling sound, like meat being thrown into a hot skillet. I didn't do risk, generally. So I thought. But I see now I'd been testing the House Rules the last few years. I'd always been a goody-goody. Study hard, obey your parents, hut-hut-hut through the training exercises of Decent Society. Then in college, now that no one was around, I started to push the boundaries, a little more each semester. I was an empty seat in lecture halls, slept late in a depressive funk, handed in term papers later and later to see how much I could get away with before the House swatted me down. Push it some more. We go to casinos to tell the everyday world that we will not submit. There are rules and codes and institutions, yes, but for a few hours in this temple of pure chaos, of random cards and inscrutable dice, we are in control of our fates. My little gambles were a way of pretending that no one was the boss of me. … The nickels poured into the basin, sweet music. If it worked once, it will work again. We hit the street. 106-8 [Matt Matros, 3x bracelet winner; wrote The Making of a Poker Player]: “One way or another you’re going to have a read, and you’re going to do something that you didn’t expect you were going to do before, right or wrong. Obviously it’s better if you’re right, but even if you’re wrong, it can be really satisfying to just have a read, a feeling, and go with it. Your gut.” I could play it safe, or I could really play. 180 Early on, you wanted to stay cool and keep out of expensive confrontations, but you also needed to feed the stack. The stack is hungry. 187 The awful knowledge that you did what you set out to do, and you would never, ever top it. It was gone the instant you put your hands on it. It was gambling. 224

The term stray refers to dogs and cats, animals traditionally viewed as pet animals, that are homeless and thus devoid of human companionship and protection. Stray animals are often perceived by individual residents as “pests” and by societal officials (specifically with respect to municipal and county animal control policies) as “nuisance animals/throwaways,” especially in the context of disease control (rabies, etc.). They are particularly vulnerable to the vagaries of existence on the street and are viewed by many people as being throwaway animals; millions of them are destroyed at animal shelters and animal control facilities in the United States each year. Four of the five violent subjects who reported acts of cruelty against stray animals reported frequent acts. Stray animals, genetically coded to bond and coexist with humans, may by necessity revert to feral (or wild) behavior, but they are not wild animals. As a result, they often seek the company of humans for food and shelter. The trust that they frequently display toward humans can be dangerous. Some of the most horrific reports of animal cruelty either committed or observed by the subjects in this study involved stray animals. These reports included exploding animals by inserting fireworks into the animal’s mouth or anus, using “Crazy Glue” to glue the paws of kittens and puppies to the middle of streets and then watching the animals be killed by passing cars, throwing stray animals to their death from rooftops, and setting animals on fire after drenching them in gasoline. Stray animals who are victims of cruelty can be analogized to the victims of serial killers, such as prostitutes and runaway juveniles; their deaths are often unseen and unknown by the average citizen until the remains are found.

The change can be measured in the increase in the proportion of women in Egypt wearing the veil, from less than 30 per cent to more than 65 per cent in two decades; by the early 1990s, the veil was established as the dress code on the Egyptian street rather than as an occasional choice. In the less-privileged villages of the Nile Delta, as well as in Cairo's and Alexandria's poorest neighbourhoods, the veil became the natural step for girls as young as twelve.5 There was also a general shift in the socially preferred pattern of gender roles, with the return to an emphasis on men's public role and women's domesticity.6

The Tea Party that reenergized the GOP in 2010 and that implacably attacked Obama turned out to be a familiar nemesis of liberalism and the middle class—even if most of its street-level partisans were middle class themselves. Inextricably combining conservatism and racism, the Tea Party was almost wholly a creature of rightwing dog whistle politics.

He’d been surprised to find that in at least one way he fit in: More than half the programmers at Goldman were Russians. Russians had a reputation for being the best programmers on Wall Street, and Serge thought he knew why: They had been forced to learn to program computers without the luxury of endless computer time. Many years later, when he had plenty of computer time, Serge still wrote out new programs on paper before typing them into the machine. “In Russia, time on the computer was measured in minutes,” he said. “When you write a program, you are given a tiny time slot to make it work. Consequently we learned to write the code in ways that minimized the amount of debugging. And so you had to think about it a lot before you committed it to paper. The ready availability of computer time creates this mode of working where you just have an idea and type it and maybe erase it ten times. Good Russian programmers, they tend to have had that one experience at some time in the past—the experience of limited access to computer time.

Rigid dress codes can indeed enforce authority and suppress individuality—an army uniform is intended to do just that. But in their time, uniforms—whether worn by schoolchildren, mailmen, train conductors or street-crossing wardens—bespoke a certain egalitarianism. A child in regulation clothing is under no pressure to compete sartorially with his better-off contemporaries. A

In the middle of the Ottawa National Forest, there is a Native American reservation where snowdrifts mark the main road into town. At the end of that town, there is a casino with penny slots and a three-story hotel. In back of that hotel, there is a locked, unmarked door with a punch code. And beyond that door is a repurposed ballroom, once used for wedding receptions, where 11 workers - backed by a Wall Street hedge fund, supported by a call center in the Philippines - now sell loans online to credit-constrained Americans at annualized interest rates of 780 percent.

The District outranks the neighboring states of Maryland and Virginia as a place suitable for aging in place, while Montgomery County edged its suburban counterparts, according to a new online rating tool that ranks nearly every neighborhood in the United States. The AARP Livability Index, which went live on Monday, uses factors such as safety, security, ease of getting around, access to health care, housing affordability and the prevalence of WiFi, farmers markets and public policies that promote successful aging. Users punch in their Zip code or street address, and the Web site crunches data to show how a community stacks up against others. Ratings come on a scale of zero to 100. Users can also rejigger the weight placed on certain factors to suit themselves. For an older person on Raleigh Avenue in Garrett Park, Md., the livability

Former and future nerdistocracy slowly, and to look at them you’d think reluctantly, filtering back out into the street, into the long September which has been with them in a virtual way since spring before last, continuing only to deepen. Putting their street faces back on for it. Faces already under silent assault, as if by something ahead, some Y2K of the workweek that no one is quite imagining, the crowds drifting slowly out into the little legendary streets, the highs beginning to dissipate, out into the casting-off of veils before the luminosities of dawn, a sea of T-shirts nobody’s reading, a clamor of messages nobody’s getting, as if it’s the true text history of nights in the Alley, outcries to be attended to and not be lost, the 3:00 am kozmo deliveries to code sessions and all-night shredding parties, the bedfellows who came and went, the bands in the clubs, the songs whose hooks still wait to ambush an idle hour, the day jobs with meetings about meetings and bosses without clue, the unreal strings of zeros, the business models changing one minute to the next, the start-up parties every night of the week and more on Thursdays than you could keep track of, which of these faces so claimed by the time, the epoch whose end they’ve been celebrating all night—which of them can see ahead, among the microclimates of binary, tracking earthwide everywhere through dark fiber and twisted pairs and nowadays wirelessly through spaces public and private, anywhere among cybersweatshop needles flashing and never still, in that unquiet vastly stitched and unstitched tapestry they have all at some time sat growing crippled in the service of—to the shape of the day imminent, a procedure waiting execution, about to be revealed, a search result with no instructions on how to look for it?

It’s like Big Sister Code or something to take the hits.

The plot is simple: First, you take an urgent date-driven project, where the shipment date cannot be delayed because of external commitments made to Wall Street or customers. Then you add a bunch of developers who use up all the time in the schedule, leaving no time for testing or operations deployment. And because no one is willing to slip the deployment date, everyone after Development has to take outrageous and unacceptable shortcuts to hit the date. The results are never pretty. Usually, the software product is so unstable and unusable that even the people who were screaming for it end up saying that it’s not worth shipping. And it’s always IT Operations who still has to stay up all night, rebooting servers hourly to compensate for crappy code, doing whatever heroics are required to hide from the rest of the world just how bad things really are.

How many close encounters with death can one person survive? At the age of 21, I had surpassed more than 10 such close encounters with death, which began when I was but 5 years of age. This enemy who has been hotly pursuing me for more than 16 years has no shame to his game at all. At least with me there were certain things I would’ve never done, and knowingly hurt a child was just one of them.

Shirt" The back, the yoke, the yardage. Lapped seams, The nearly invisible stitches along the collar Turned in a sweatshop by Koreans or Malaysians Gossiping over tea and noodles on their break Or talking money or politics while one fitted This armpiece with its overseam to the band Of cuff I button at my wrist. The presser, the cutter, The wringer, the mangle. The needle, the union, The treadle, the bobbin. The code. The infamous blaze At the Triangle Factory in nineteen-eleven. One hundred and forty-six died in the flames On the ninth floor, no hydrants, no fire escapes— The witness in a building across the street Who watched how a young man helped a girl to step Up to the windowsill, then held her out Away from the masonry wall and let her drop. And then another. As if he were helping them up To enter a streetcar, and not eternity. A third before he dropped her put her arms Around his neck and kissed him. Then he held Her into space, and dropped her. Almost at once He stepped to the sill himself, his jacket flared And fluttered up from his shirt as he came down, Air filling up the legs of his gray trousers— Like Hart Crane’s Bedlamite, “shrill shirt ballooning.” Wonderful how the pattern matches perfectly Across the placket and over the twin bar-tacked Corners of both pockets, like a strict rhyme Or a major chord. Prints, plaids, checks, Houndstooth, Tattersall, Madras. The clan tartans Invented by mill-owners inspired by the hoax of Ossian, To control their savage Scottish workers, tamed By a fabricated heraldry: MacGregor, Bailey, MacMartin. The kilt, devised for workers To wear among the dusty clattering looms. Weavers, carders, spinners. The loader, The docker, the navvy. The planter, the picker, the sorter Sweating at her machine in a litter of cotton As slaves in calico headrags sweated in fields: George Herbert, your descendant is a Black Lady in South Carolina, her name is Irma And she inspected my shirt. Its color and fit And feel and its clean smell have satisfied Both her and me. We have culled its cost and quality Down to the buttons of simulated bone, The buttonholes, the sizing, the facing, the characters Printed in black on neckband and tail. The shape, The label, the labor, the color, the shade. The shirt.

Mr. Gunt, Mr. Neal here is a street survivor. We at the airline are honoring the homeless this year, and it was our airline's privilege and delight to offer him the one remaining business-class seat as a token of our faith in the triumph of the human spirit over adversity. With the full authority of the EU air-system code behind me, I order you back to 67E.

Every manager of a Wall Street tech group likes to have people believe that his guys are geniuses. Russians, whatever. His whole persona among his peers is that what he and his team do can’t be replicated. When people find out that ninety-five percent of their code is open source, it kills that perception.

Worst Comes To Worst" (feat. Guru) [Babu mixing] "Worst come to worst my peoples come first" "Worst...come.....to worst" "Worst come to worst my peoples come first" "Worst come...to...worst" "Worst come to worst my peoples come first" [Evidence talking] Yeah It's goin down y'all That's Babu Yo, some people got good friends, at night I live my life right Intense, on the edge On the wild, I'm from the group where friction leads to fire Stack your bricks, the time is take your pick Do or don't, the track - Alchemist My life is good, I got my peeps in the mix, so... "Worst come to worst my people come first" [Iriscience] I got worldwide family all over the earth And I worry 'bout 'em all for whatever it's worth From the birth to the hearse, the streets, the guns burst Words I disperse are here to free minds And if mine are needy I need to feed mine "When worst come to worst..." [Evidence] Set up shop and write a verse Actually (what?), that's best come to best My lyrics take care of me, they therapy Get shit off my chest Extra stress, three-four over the score Different patterns of rhymin prepare me for war So next time you see us we'll be deadly on tour [Babu mixing] "Oh, when you need me" "Worst come to worst my peoples come first" [Guru talking] Word up, if worst comes to worst, I make whole crews disperse You know it's family first Gifted Unlimited with Dilated Peoples Babu, Evidence, Iriscience And a shout out to my man Alchemist on the trizzack "Oh, when you need me" "Worst come to worst my peoples come first" [Iriscience] I'm a glutton for the truth, even though truth hurts I've studied with my peoples on streets and in church We make it hard when we go on first Long road, honor of the samurai code These California streets ain't paved with gold Worst comes to worst "Worst come to worst my people come first" [Evidence] Uh, I got them back, at the end of the day We could go our seperate ways but the songs remains, it won't change Got my target locked at range I might switch gears but first I switch lanes Without my people I got nothin to gain That's why... "Worst come to worst my people come first" [Iriscience] Special victims unit, catalyst for movement Creates to devastate, since '84 show improvement Definitely Dilated Peoples comes first Cross-trainin spar, we raise the bar And we put it in your ear no matter who you are [Babu mixing] "Oh, when you need me" "Worst come to worst my peoples come first" "Worst....come...worst my peoples come first" "Worst...worst....worst....come to worst my peoples come first" "...my..my...my peoples come first "Oh, when you need me

In 1978 zip or postcodes were introduced in the Netherlands; they consist of four numbers followed by a space and then to capital letters and are replaced before the name of the town... they referred to the city block in a given street in which the house occurs and thus the Dutch postal code book is the size of a telephone book.

In the streets, violence was dealt with more violence. That was the code that I learned growing up in Nawlins,

212 area code—

They will call the police, who will arrest this person, and for a night or two they will have a place to sleep in a jail cell. The police cannot solve poverty, joblessness, and the housing crisis—the actual culprits in the lives of the homeless. But if we’ve deemed the homeless, not poverty, the problem, then what the police can do is make them disappear. The major tools the police carry are handcuffs and guns; they can arrest or kill. The police can go forth and round up the homeless, then place them in cages. And to grant them the authority, local governments can criminalize the existence of the homeless: they can criminalize sleeping outside, or criminalize panhandling, which begins to look a lot like the criminalization of vagrancy as part of the Black Codes in the era that ended Reconstruction. And then, our local governments can fund a separate police force for the subway system to punish turnstile jumpers, arrest women selling churros, and clear out more homeless people, while neighborhood associations ensure no new homeless shelters get built near or in affluent neighborhoods. The streets remain the only place for them to call home.

But I'd been around enough street cats to know the code: they hit you with a knife, you find a gun. And I didn't have to be a Black Panther to know that n**** was the ultimate fighting word. This was the kind of knowledge we understood, the kind of code that was so deeply fundamental it never had to be fully articulated.

The dude shouting about “black-on-black crime” is reinforced by elected officials coding “problem neighborhoods” and promising to “clean up the streets” that surprisingly always seem to have a lot of brown and black people on them—and end with a lot of black and brown people in handcuffs.

The truth is, you don’t even have to “be racist” to be a part of the racist system. The dude shouting about “black-on-black crime” is reinforced by elected officials coding “problem neighborhoods” and promising to “clean up the streets” that surprisingly always seem to have a lot of brown and black people on them—and end with a lot of black and brown people in handcuffs. Your aunt yelling about “thugs” is echoed in our politicians talking about “super-predators” while building our school-to-prison pipelines that help ensure that the widest path available to black and brown children ends in a jail cell. But a lot of the people voting for stop-and-frisk crime bills or increased security in schools would never dream of blaming racial inequity on “black-on-black crime” or calling a young black man a “thug.

Charlie Kirk says, “What you see on the college campuses, you will soon see on the streets.

Benzer went to a meeting in India. Wandering in the street markets looking for exotica—he had acquired a taste for strange foods as well as strange hours—Benzer saw a soothsayer with a bird. Passersby would ask the soothsayer a question. Then the man would ask the bird. The bird would go into the cage, peck among the scraps of paper on the floor, and bring out an answer. Benzer asked, “Is the genetic code universal?” The bird gave the answer “The news from home is good.

Both Mussolini and Hitler could perceive the space available, and were willing to trim their movements to fit. The space was partly symbolic. The Nazi Party early shaped its identity by staking a claim to the street and fought with communist gangs for control of working-class neighborhoods of Berlin. At issue was not merely a few meters of urban “turf.” The Nazis sought to portray themselves as the most vigorous and effective force against the communists—and, at the same time, to portray the liberal state as incapable of preserving public security. The communists, at the same time, were showing that the Social Democrats were unequipped to deal with an incipient revolutionary situation that needed a fighting vanguard. Polarization was in the interest of both. Fascist violence was neither random nor indiscriminate. It carried a well-calculated set of coded messages: that communist violence was rising, that the democratic state was responding to it ineptly, and that only the fascists were tough enough to save the nation from antinational terrorists. An essential step in the fascist march to acceptance and power was to persuade law-and-order conservatives and members of the middle class to tolerate fascist violence as a harsh necessity in the face of Left provocation. It helped, of course, that many ordinary citizens never feared fascist violence against themselves, because they were reassured that it was reserved for national enemies and “terrorists” who deserved it. Fascists encouraged a distinction between members of the nation who merited protection and outsiders who deserved rough handling. One of the most sensational cases of Nazi violence before power was the murder of a communist laborer of Polish descent in the town of Potempa, in Silesia, by five SA men in August 1932. It became sensational when the killers’ death sentences were commuted, under Nazi pressure, to life imprisonment. Party theorist Alfred Rosenberg took the occasion to underscore the difference between “bourgeois justice,” according to which “one Polish Communist has the same weighting as five Germans, frontsoldiers,” and National Socialist ideology, according to which “one soul does not equal another soul, one person not another.” Indeed, Rosenberg went on, for National Socialism, “there is no ‘law as such.’” The legitimation of violence against a demonized internal enemy brings us close to the heart of fascism. For some, fascist violence was more than useful: it was beautiful. Some war veterans and intellectuals (Marinetti and Ernst Jünger were both) indulged in the aesthetics of violence. Violence often appealed to men too young to have known it in 1914–18 and who felt cheated of their war. It appealed to some women, too. But it is a mistake to regard fascist success as solely the triumph of the D’Annunzian hero. It was the genius of fascism to wager that many an orderly bourgeois (or even bourgeoise) would take some vicarious satisfaction in a carefully selective violence, directed only against “terrorists” and “enemies of the people.” A climate of polarization helped the new fascist catch-all parties sweep up many who became disillusioned with the old deference (“honoratioren”) parties. This was risky, of course. Polarization could send the mass of angry protesters to the Left under certain conditions (as in Russia in 1917). Hitler and Mussolini understood that while Marxism now appealed mainly to blue-collar workers (and not to all of them), fascism was able to appeal more broadly across class lines. In postrevolutionary western Europe, a climate of polarization worked in fascism’s favor.

Make sure you wear it on the left side. That means you're single and ready for new adventures. 'Left is for looking, right is for cooking.'" Lisbeth giggles, almost blushes, and lifts her hand to her head reflexively. She's seen women on the street with flowers behind their ears, along the road, in stores, on their way home from the fields carrying baskets of cassava, the yellowish white root that's used in every meal. She's seen the red hibiscus, the bulging ginger blossom, the bewitchingly aromatic frangipani behind the ears of men too, but she wasn't aware of this secret code for courting.

Britain had become a kind of cargo cult, a jumble of disassociated local customs, rituals and superstitions: uncanny relics of the distant, unknowable Britain of ancient days. Why, for instance, do sword dancers lock weapons in magical shapes such as the pentagram or the six-pointed star, led by a man wearing a fox’s head? What is the straw bear plodding round the village of Whittlesey in Cambridgeshire every January? Why do a bunch of Nutters black up their faces and perform a coconut dance in several Lancashire villages? What possesses people to engage in the crazed ‘furry dance’, singing the ‘Hal-An-Tow’ song, on 6 May at Helston in Cornwall? Why do beribboned hobby horses canter round the streets of Padstow and Minehead every May Day, with attendant ‘Gullivers’ lunging at onlookers with a giant pair of pincers? The persistence of such rites, and the apparent presence of codes, occult symbolism and nature magic in the dances, mummers’ plays and balladry of yore, have provided a rich compost for some of the outgrowths of folk in the 1960s and afterwards. Even to dip a toe into the world of folklore is to unearth an Other Britain, one composed of mysterious fragments and survivals – a rickety bridge to the sweet grass of Albion. As Bert Lloyd mentioned, ‘To our toiling ancestors [these customs] meant everything, and in a queer irrational way they can still mean much to us.’1

The Civil Rights Movement meant that “the days of respectable racism were over.”18 And so in his bid for the presidency, Wallace mastered the use of race-neutral language to explain what was at stake for disgruntled working-class whites, particularly those whose neighborhoods butted right up against black enclaves. To the thousands, sometimes tens of thousands, who came to his campaign rallies in Detroit, Boston, San Francisco, New York, Chicago, and San Diego, he played on the ever-present fear that blacks were breaking out of crime-filled ghettos and moving “into our streets, our schools, our neighborhoods,” signaling in unmistakable but still-unspoken code that “a nigger’s trying to get your job, trying to move into your neighborhood.”19 For working-class whites whose hold on some semblance of the American dream was becoming increasingly tenuous as the economy buckled under pressure from financing both the Great Society and the Vietnam War (on a tax cut), this was naturally upsetting.20 Black gains, it was assumed, could come only at the expense of whites.

I wanted to someday know the code of her elegance and precision and genius, the prose I admired so much, but I wanted to read about my dreamers in their smog-shrouded pale asphalt streets, in their orange groves where the white blossoms fell around us like stars when the sun was going down, in their canyons where the gods of the mountains, like Tahquitz, waited for revenge, in their silver-hot vineyards and the date groves of Mecca where dark men cut grapes and put paper bags around the date clusters. And now it is here. Inlandia.

She's seen women on the street with flowers behind their ears, along the road, in stores, on their way home from the fields carrying baskets of cassava, the yellowish white root that's used in every meal. She's seen the red hibiscus, the bulging ginger blossom, the bewitchingly aromatic frangipani behind the ears of men too, but she wasn't aware of this secret code for courting.

Take, for instance, a parody project that begins by subverting the anti-Black logics embedded in new high-tech approaches to crime prevention (Figure 5.2). Instead of using predictive policing techniques to forecast street crime, the White-Collar Early Warning System flips the script by creating a heat map that flags city blocks where financial crimes are likely to occur.

But the events that transpired on those various dates did not throw the city of Moscow into upheaval. When the page was torn from the calendar, the bedroom windows did not suddenly shine with the light of a million electric lamps; that Fatherly gaze did not suddenly hang over every desk and appear in every dream; nor did the drivers of a hundred Black Marias turn the keys in their ignitions and fan out into the shadowy streets. For the launch of the First Five-Year Plan, Bukharin’s fall from grace, and the expansion of the Criminal Code to allow the arrest of anyone even countenancing dissension, these were only tidings, omens, underpinnings. And it would be a decade before their effects were fully felt. No.

Well, that might be fine for the lot of you,” Kerry broke in, “but given you’re siding with Mr. Wingman here, it hardly does me any good. What happened to the whole sisterhood thing? And this after I came to you, hat in hand--” “You were dragged in,” Fiona reminded her. “Laundry basket in hand. Then we had to all but sit on you to squeeze the details out of you. If you want us to be all supportive and on your side, then, you know, you have to actually give us something to side with. So far, all we’ve heard is how you didn’t know how he felt, and then he sent your entire world spinning off its axis with that--” “Fiona--” Kerry said, clear warning in her tone. But it was too late. Logan had walked back to the group and was just saying he had a sailboat lined up and did they want a captain or were they going to sail it themselves, when he overheard the last bit of Fiona’s statement and paused. He turned to look at Kerry, then perhaps a tad more menacingly at Cooper. “With that…what?” Before Cooper could remind him about their recently established wingman/bro code status, Logan’s wife slid past him and hooked her arm through her husband’s and tipped up on her toes to kiss him on the cheek. “Remember our first kiss?” She gave him a meaningful look to go with what was clearly a very private smile. “So I really don’t think you want to go there. Do you?” Logan cleared his throat. “Right, so…as you were,” he finally said. “I’ve got to get back to the station. Keep the mean streets of Blueberry Cove safe.” “Coward!” Kerry called after his retreating back. “See?” Delia said. “We have our ways.” “Except you’re supporting the wrong side,” Kerry said. “Oh, that all depends on how you define ‘sides,’” Grace put in. “We’re on the side of love.” She drew out that last word, making it sound almost like a coo, with Fiona joining her, both of them adding an exaggerated batting of lashes, aimed first at Kerry, then at Cooper. Fiona added a little heart made by steepling her fingers together. Logan looked back over his shoulder. He was grinning now. “If you know what’s good for you, you’ll head back to the airport right now,” he called to Cooper. Cooper lifted his hand in a wave. “No worries, mate.

The street was one of the seedier places in Juarez, a place where gringo tourists didn't usually show their faces. The tall American who was leaning against the bar was out of place, but as long as he didn't mind spending fifteen dollars for a bottle of beer, the bartender wasn't going to object to his presence. He was already on his third bottle, and Felicita had been sitting with him for

LeRoy got into a bit of trouble early in 1978 when it was learned that she was preparing certain dishes in her kitchen for the Tavern on the Green, another of her husband’s restaurants just down the street. This, it seemed, violated some city health code. In addition to kitchens that a luxury hotel might envy, the LeRoy apartment also contains a screening room for movies.

as numerous individual colored folders, one for each of the following categories: • Insurance info • Mortgage info • Purchase docs • Monthly income statements • Bank statements • Tenant interactions • Rehab and maintenance • Tenant files • Receipts • Miscellaneous paperwork This way, each property will have one overarching folder file, as well as several color-coded folders for easy retrieval of information. Need insurance docs for 123 Main Street? Oh, that’s in the 123 Main Street file, red folder.

was a formative presence in global diplomacy.86 Cousin Alice pronounced calling and card-leaving “a Washington mania that no sane human beings should let themselves in for.”87 It was also work: it took patience and stamina and kindness; Alice did not want the authority of donkey work, nor did she have the impulse to be kind. Her object was to be feared—to be the alpha female whose invitations to her own select circle were coveted.88 Eleanor’s authority rested on being in earnest and in her instinct for knowing just when someone needed a bunch of violets or a small present for a voyage to France. She never shirked from the toil of the card case; she never claimed “delicacy,”89 or “a brief illness,” code among official ladies for marital strain, excessive menstruation, or depression.90 She made one exception to her all-in cooperation as a naval wife. To staff the gloomy house on N Street, she had brought from New York four servants, all white, who joined Auntie Bye’s two oldest retainers, both African-American. But Franklin’s boss, devoutly Christian, had also been North Carolina’s all too effective collaborator in resisting Reconstruction’s political empowerment of formerly enslaved African Americans.91 In 1898, as editor of the state’s most prominent newspaper, Daniels served as the propaganda wing of a conspiracy to overthrow the elected multiracial government

The Street is a groundbreaking work of American literature that is as relevant today as when it was published in 1946. When it won Ann Petry the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship Award, the literary world was put on notice. Everyone agreed that the novel was brilliant, but, as is the case with staggering talents, difficult to classify. At the time, African American literature was tacitly understood to be African American male literature; and women’s literature was coded as white women’s literature.

States government with stealing Goldman Sachs’s computer code. I’d thought it strange, after the financial crisis, in which Goldman had played such an important role, that the only Goldman Sachs employee who had been charged with any sort of crime was the employee who had taken something from Goldman Sachs. I’d thought it even stranger that government prosecutors had argued that the Russian shouldn’t

At Berkshire, managers can focus on running their businesses: They are not subjected to meetings at headquarters nor financing worries nor Wall Street harassment. They simply get a letter from me every two years (reproduced at the end of this letter) and call me when they wish. And their wishes do differ: There are managers to whom I have not talked in the last year, while there is one with whom I talk almost daily. Our trust is in people rather than process. A “hire well, manage little” code suits both them and me.

Once you crack the code, every building, every field, every street becomes more significant, more fascinating, more revealing. And with each new discovery, you learn more about yourself.

Later on that same day, the reelected President Bush set out his legislative objectives for his second term. Making America a more moral country was not a priority. Instead, his goals were mainly economic: he would privatize Social Security once and for all and “reform” the federal tax code. “Another Winner Is Big Business,” declared a headline in the Wall Street Journal on November 4, as businessmen everywhere celebrated the election results as a thumbs-up on outsourcing and continued deregulation. The stock market soared nearly 8 percent in the year’s remaining weeks in giddy anticipation of the profitable things Republicans would do with their fresh political capital.

the data was plotted on mathematical diagrams that I invented. These revealed favorable situations and let me quickly specify the appropriate trades. Each day’s closing prices for a convertible and its stock were plotted as a color-coded dot on that particular convertible’s diagram. The diagrams were prepared with curves that were drawn by a computer from my formula and showed the “fair price” of the convertible. The beauty of this was that I could immediately see from the picture whether we had a profitable trading opportunity. If the dot representing the data was above the curve it meant the convertible was overpriced, leading to a possible hedge: Short the convertible, buy the stock. A data point close to or on the curve indicated the price was fair, which meant liquidate an existing position, do not enter a new one. Below the curve meant buy the convertible, short the stock. The distance of the dot from the curve showed me how much profit was available. If we thought it met our target, we tried to put on the trade the next day. The slope of the curve near the data point on my diagram gave me the hedge ratio, which is the number of shares of common stock to use versus each convertible bond, share of preferred, warrant, or option.

Good Wall Street headhunters made millions of dollars, and I knew this guy wasn’t calling me to be nice. He wanted my head. It wasn’t easy camouflaging these calls. If you’ve ever seen a trading floor, you might wonder how a salesman can even speak to a headhunter without arousing suspicion from the other salesmen just a few feet away. I knew detection could be fatal. Several salesmen had been disciplined or fired for negotiating with headhunters at work. To be safe, we devised elaborate systems to conceal our job searches, including code language and late-night meetings. My new system, copied from a colleague, was simple but not foolproof: The headhunter called using a friend’s name, and I picked up the phone and pretended to be talking to the friend while the headhunter described the job he had to offer. If I wanted to discuss the job, I would hang up, leave the trading floor, and call the headhunter from one of the pay phones in the lobby. Others used this system, too, and around bonus time, salesmen besieged those phones.

Fortunately one of the managers from Morgan Stanley had prepared me for this onslaught, warning me that my bosses at First Boston would persist in trying to persuade me to stay. He had suggested that if I used the words “better opportunity,” they would back down. I was waiting for the right moment to try those words. When the sales manager again offered to whip out his personal checkbook, I finally said: “The offer from Morgan Stanley is a better opportunity.” He stopped in his tracks. Those two words—“better opportunity”—are Wall Street code for “more money than you can possibly pay me.

The earth-shattering suggestion of the research conducted in the 1960s and 1970s was that the code might actually be unbreakable, and efforts to decipher it were expensive and futile.

Cotton candy. The birds were exploding into cotton candy, which was now coating the street like a sugary snowstorm. It was bizarre, nonsensical, and disturbing on multiple levels. Only the younger people in attendance actually needed that signature line at the beginning. The rest had been around long enough to know a Captain Bullshit production when they saw one.