String To Double Quotes

It is as though the space between us were time: an irrevocable quality. It is as though time, no longer running straight before us in a diminishing line, now runs parallel between us like a looping string, the distance being the doubling accretion of the thread an not the interval between.

Faith seems to grab people and not let go, but hope is a double-crosser. It can beat it on you anytime; it's your job to dig in your heels and hang on. Must be nice to have hope in your pocket, like loose change you could jingle through your fingers.

Not long ago, I advertised for perverse rules of grammar, along the lines of "Remember to never split an infinitive" and "The passive voice should never be used." The notion of making a mistake while laying down rules ("Thimk," "We Never Make Misteaks") is highly unoriginal, and it turns out that English teachers have been circulating lists of fumblerules for years. As owner of the world's largest collection, and with thanks to scores of readers, let me pass along a bunch of these never-say-neverisms: * Avoid run-on sentences they are hard to read. * Don't use no double negatives. * Use the semicolon properly, always use it where it is appropriate; and never where it isn't. * Reserve the apostrophe for it's proper use and omit it when its not needed. * Do not put statements in the negative form. * Verbs has to agree with their subjects. * No sentence fragments. * Proofread carefully to see if you any words out. * Avoid commas, that are not necessary. * If you reread your work, you will find on rereading that a great deal of repetition can be avoided by rereading and editing. * A writer must not shift your point of view. * Eschew dialect, irregardless. * And don't start a sentence with a conjunction. * Don't overuse exclamation marks!!! * Place pronouns as close as possible, especially in long sentences, as of 10 or more words, to their antecedents. * Writers should always hyphenate between syllables and avoid un-necessary hyph-ens. * Write all adverbial forms correct. * Don't use contractions in formal writing. * Writing carefully, dangling participles must be avoided. * It is incumbent on us to avoid archaisms. * If any word is improper at the end of a sentence, a linking verb is. * Steer clear of incorrect forms of verbs that have snuck in the language. * Take the bull by the hand and avoid mixed metaphors. * Avoid trendy locutions that sound flaky. * Never, ever use repetitive redundancies. * Everyone should be careful to use a singular pronoun with singular nouns in their writing. * If I've told you once, I've told you a thousand times, resist hyperbole. * Also, avoid awkward or affected alliteration. * Don't string too many prepositional phrases together unless you are walking through the valley of the shadow of death. * Always pick on the correct idiom. * "Avoid overuse of 'quotation "marks."'" * The adverb always follows the verb. * Last but not least, avoid cliches like the plague; seek viable alternatives." (New York Times, November 4, 1979; later also published in book form)

Who is the best marshal they have?' The sheriff thought on it for a minute. He said, 'I would have to weigh that proposition. There is near about two hundred of them. I reckon William Waters is the best tracker. He is a half-breed Comanche and it is something to see, watching him cut for sign. The meanest one is Rooster Cogburn. He is a pitiless man, double-tough, and fear don't enter into his thinking. He loves to pull a cork. Now L.T. Quinn, he brings his prisoners in alive. He may let one get by now and then but he believes even the worst of men is entitled to a fair shake. Also the court does not pay any fees for dead men. Quinn is a good peace officer and a lay preacher to boot. He will not plant evidence or abuse a prisoner. He is straight as a string. Yes, I will say Quinn is about the best they have.' I said, 'Where can I find this Rooster?

A leaf of all colors plays a golden-string fiddle To a double-e waterfall over my back

These were strange caricatures of human beings, weirdly inflated, their breasts enormous spheres, held in place by string bikinis with cups the size of fourteen-meter yacht spinnakers. Their legs were elongated too, their toes pointed straight downward into high-heeled shoes steeper than double black-diamond ski runs.

You know that eye-to-eye recognition, when two people look deeply into each other's pupils, and burrow to the soul? It usually comes before love. I mean the clear, deep, milk-eyed recognition expressed by the poet Donne. Their eyebeams twisted and did thread their eyes upon a double string. My father recognized that the Professor was a Troll, and the Professor recognized my father's recognition. Both of them knew that the Professor had eaten his wife. - The Troll

The river itself is not a hundred yards across, and pa and Vernon and Vardaman and Dewey Dell are the only things in sight not of that single monotony of desolation leaning with that terrific quality a little from right to left, as though we had reached the place where the motion of the wasted world accelerates just before the final precipice. Yet they appear dwarfed. It is as though the space between us were time: an irrevocable quality. It is as though time, no longer running straight before us in a diminishing line, now runs parallel between us like a looping string, the distance being the doubling accretion of the thread and not the interval between. The mules stand, their fore quarters already sloped a little, their rumps high. They too are breathing now with a deep groaning sound; looking back once, their gaze sweeps across us with in their eyes a wild, sad, profound and despairing quality as though they had already seen in the thick water the shape of the disaster which they could not speak and we could not see.

They were both somewhat short-sighted, and when it was the custom to wear a single eyeglass and string they wore a single eyeglass and string; when it was the custom to wear a double glass they wore a double glass; when it was the custom to wear spectacles they wore spectacles straightway, all without reference to the particular variety of defect in their own vision. When Wordsworth was enthroned they carried pocket copies; and when Shelley was belittled they allowed him to grow dusty on their shelves.

Slut Shaming Misogyny is like a malignant virus, the way it seeps into your life and puts you in a position of painful vulnerability. Where even the people who love you will judge you for your past. Where the act of sex degrades a woman and celebrates a man. The infuriating double standard where a man will admire a girl in a string bikini, and in the same breath, tell his partner that her skirt is too short

For my number-one favorite kill, I almost went with Johnny Depp being eaten alive and then regurgitated by his own bed in A Nightmare on Elm Street, but the winner, by a finger blade’s width, has to be the death of that feisty Tina (Amanda Wyss), who put up such a fight while I thrashed her about on the ceiling of her bedroom. Freddy loves a worthy adversary, especially if it’s a nubile teenaged girl. A close second goes to my hearing-impaired victim Carlos (Ricky Dean Logan) in Nightmare 6. In these uber-politically-correct times, it’s refreshing to remember what an equal opportunity killer Freddy always was. Not only does he pump up the volume on the hearing aid from hell, but he also adds a nice Latino kid to his body count. Today they probably wouldn’t even let Freddy force-feed a fat kid junk food. Dream death number three is found in a sequence from Nightmare 3. Freddy plays puppet master with victim Phillip (Bradley Gregg), converting his arm and leg tendons into marionette strings, then cutting them in a Freddy meets Verigo moment. The kiss of death Profressor Freddy gives Sheila (Toy Newkirk) is great, but not as good as Al Pacino’s in The Godfather, so my fourth pick is Freddy turning Debbie (Brooke Theiss) into her worst nightmare, a cockroach, and crushing her in a Roach Motel. A classic Kafka/Krueger kill. For my final fave, you will have to check out Freddy vs. Jason playing at a Hell’s Octoplex near you. Here’s a hint: the hockey-puck guy and I double team a member of Destiny’s Child. Yummy! Now where’s that Beyonce…

Relly fired off the opening riff. Butt laid down the beat, old doom and new joy mixed together. "I wait till I, like fire, shall rise," Jerod sang. And then again, louder, wailing sure and true. I was the last one to join in. I had a bass line all wroked out, of course. I'd been waiting weeks for this momment. My fingers colosed on the strings, pressed them hard to the frets. Butt and Relly were locked in, repeating the four-bar intro. Louder and louder, fierce as a war cry. "Ok," I whispered into the pounding noise. I joined in, doubling Relly at first, then splitting off to coil our riffs together. It was great, it was huge, it was endless. The song rose, churning and sucking everything in like a cyclone. "The will my voice in great goodbyes," Jerod screamed from the speakers. "Join to the chorus of the skies." Silence was inside me, riding the Ghost Metal tornado. Right at the center, at the heart of the song. I didn't need a voice. I had a bass. I didn't need to hear myself talk or sing. Jerod could make the words for me. Or maybe it was Silence herself, pouring out through the PA system. Either way, any way, They were my words. And all the world would hear them.

Unfortunately, no one has ever successfully postulated a super-symmetry holding between two known particles. Instead, in all the supersymmetric theories the numbers of particles are at least doubled. A new superpartner is simply postulated to go along with each known particle. Not only are there squarks and sleptons and photinos, there are also sneutrinos to partner the neutrinos, Higgsinos with the Higgs, and gravitinos to go with the gravitons. Two by two, a regular Noah's ark of particles. Sooner or later, tangled in the web of new snames and naminos, you begin to feel like Sbozo the clown. Or Bozo the clownino. Or swhatever.

Thus, the double unification given by the equivalence principle becomes a triple unification: All motions are equivalent once the effects of gravity are taken into account, gravity is indistinguishable from acceleration, and the gravitational field is unified with the geometry of space and time. When worked out in detail, this became Einstein's general theory of relativity, which he published in full form in 1915.

He knew everything. He knew at least a thousand Hungarian folk songs, all the words and tunes, he could handle Gypsies, give them instructions and keep them in order, check their familiarity with the flicker of an eyelid, then win their affection with a lordly, condescending, and yet fraternal-playful sidelong glance, he could call 'acsi' perfectly, shout at the first violin when he didn't strike up Csendesen, csak csendesen quietly enough and the cimbalonist when the padded sticks didn't make the steel strings thunder and rumble sufficiently in Hullamzo Balaton, he could kiss the viola player's pock-marked face, give the double bass a kick, break glasses and mirrors, drink wine, beer and marc brandy for three days on end out of tumblers, smack his lips at the site of cabbage soup and cold pork stew, take ages inspecting his cards (with relish, one eye closed), dance a quick csardas for a whole half-hour, urging and driving himself on to stamp and shout and toss his partner high in the air and catch her, light as a feather, with one arm: so, as I said, he could do everything that raises Man from his animal condition and makes him truly Man.

In the time of chimpanzees, I was a monkey Butane in my veins and I'm out to cut the junkie With the plastic eyeballs, spray paint the vegetables Dog food stalls with the beefcake pantyhose Kill the headlights and put it in neutral Stock car flamin' with a loser in the cruise control Baby's in Reno with the Vitamin D Got a couple of couches, sleep on the love seat Someone came in sayin' I'm insane to complain About a shotgun wedding and a stain on my shirt Don't believe everything that you breathe You get a parking violation and a maggot on your sleeve So shave your face with some mace in the dark Savin' all your food stamps and burnin' down the trailer park Yo, cut it Soy un perdedor I'm a loser, baby, so why don't you kill me? (Double barrel buckshot) Soy un perdedor I'm a loser baby, so why don't you kill me? Forces of evil on a bozo nightmare Ban all the music with a phony gas chamber 'Cause one's got a weasel and the other's got a flag One's on the pole, shove the other in a bag With the rerun shows and the cocaine nose-job The daytime crap of the folksinger slob He hung himself with a guitar string A slab of turkey neck and it's hangin' from a pigeon wing You can't write if you can't relate Trade the cash for the beef, for the body, for the hate And my time is a piece of wax fallin' on a termite That's chokin' on the splinters Soy un perdedor I'm a loser baby, so why don't you kill me? (Get crazy with the cheese whiz) Soy un perdedor I'm a loser baby, so why don't you kill me? (Drive-by body pierce) Yo, bring it on down I'm a driver, I'm a winner Things are gonna change, I can feel it Soy un perdedor I'm a loser baby, so why don't you kill me? (I can't believe you) Soy un perdedor I'm a loser baby, so why don't you kill me? Soy un perdedor I'm a loser baby, so why don't you kill me? (Sprechen sie Deutsche, baby) Soy un perdedor I'm a loser, baby, so why don't you kill me? (Know what I'm sayin'?)

When she was safely in America, Sarah Liu and two other refugees from the South China Church all resettled in Midland. The Midland community helped provide support for their living expenses under ChinaAid. We invited them over to our home during the Christmas season. We watched as Sarah walked ever so slowly up to our Christmas tree and stared at the lights twinkling on and off, absolutely mesmerized. “Those are just decorations,” I explained. “They’re on a string.” I pulled out a package and handed them to her, so she could see what they looked like before being draped over the tree. She took the string of lights out of the package faster than I could blink, her hands untangling them like she was knitting a blanket. Within seconds, she had completely unwrapped and disassembled the lights. Then she looked up at me with the various parts in her hands. “I assembled these in my labor camp for sixteen hours a day,” she explained. “We made Christmas lights and put them in packages that look just like this one.” She then reassembled them just as quickly. The whole process took only seconds.

Small Change Snack Tips 1. Limit a snack to approximately 200 calories maximum. 2. Turn coffee or a tea into a snack by adding a cup of low-fat milk or soymilk. 3. Do not have a carbohydrate alone (such as an apple or a serving of crackers); you will still be hungry. Instead, pair a carb with a lean protein or healthy fat. Have low-fat cheese with your apple, or some peanut butter on your whole grain crackers. 4. It’s okay to have carbs alone before bed (such as a piece of fruit) because it doesn’t need to keep you full—you’re about to go to sleep. 5. Don’t double dip. For instance, don’t do string cheese and nuts, or string cheese and yogurt. Instead, choose one high-fiber carb and one lean protein or healthy fat; otherwise your calories (and fat) can add up. 6. When you eat straight from the bag, box, or can, you’ll consume more. Preportion items like nuts in resealable snack-size bags. 7. Try to keep snacktime to three hours after you have eaten. If you eat it too close to your last meal, it won’t do its job for the next meal. 8. If buying an energy bar, read the label and look for more fiber and protein, less calories and fat. 9. Just because it’s a “100-calorie pack” doesn’t mean it is a healthy snack. Make sure it offers some fiber and protein or healthy fat—and if not, skip it.

What’s he doing?” I asked, leaning over the side of the boat, searching for him beneath the water. If the tow rope had gotten tangled, he might need help. And someone would need to go in the water with him, perhaps accidentally sliding against him down where no one else could see. “Boo!” A handful of bryozoa rushed up at me from the lake. I screamed (for once I didn’t have to think about this girl-reaction) and fell backward into the boat. Sean hefted himself over the side with one arm, holding the bryozoan high in the other hand. It dripped green slime through his fingers. “Bwa-ha-ha!” He came after me. I squealed again. It was so unbelievably fantastic that he was flirting with me, but bryozoa was involved. Was it worth it? No. I paused on the side of the boat, ready to jump back into the water myself. He might chase me around the lake with the bryozoa, but at least it would be diluted. On second thought, I didn’t particularly want to jump into the very waters the bryozoa had come from. Sean solved the problem for me. He slipped behind me and showed me he was holding the ties of my bikini in his free hand. If I jumped, Sean would take possession of my bikini top. I had thought about double knotting my bikini. I’d hoped against hope that Stage Two: Bikini would work, and that Sean might try something like this. Of course, I didn’t really want my top to come off in front of everyone. Nay, in front of anyone. But I’d checked the double knots in the mirror. They’d looked…well, double knotted, for protection, sort of like wearing a turtleneck to the prom. I’d re-tied the strings normally. Now I wished I’d double knotted after all. Sean brought the dripping slime close to my shoulder. “Go ahead and jump,” he said, twisting my bikini ties in his finges. “Sean,” came McGullicuddy’s voice in warning. This surprised me. My brother had never taken up for me before. Of course, none of the boys had ever crossed this particular line. But that was nothing compared with my surprise when the bryozoa suddenly lobbed out of Sean’s hand, sailed through the air, and plopped into the lake. Adam, standing behind him, must have shoved his arm. Which meant I owed Adam my gratitude for saving me. Except I didn’t want him to save me from Sean, and I thought I’d made that clear. Saving me from Sean with bryozoa…that was a more iffy proposition. I wasn’t sure whether I should give Adam the little dolphin look again when our eyes met. But it didn’t matter. When I turned around, he was already stepping over Cameron’s legs to return to the driver’s seat.

And because I’d begged my mom for the damn cat, guess who got stuck picking up after her?” I poked both of my thumbs hard into my chest. “This girl. But that wasn’t the worst of it.” “Should I pull over for this?” Jamie teased. “This is serious, Jamie Shaw!” I smacked his bicep and he chuckled, holding the steering wheel with his thumbs but lifting the rest of his fingers as if to say “my bad.” “Anyway,” I continued. “So, Rory would always find small ways to torture me. Like she would eat her string toys and then throw up on my favorite clothes. Or wait until I was in the deepest part of sleep and jump onto my bed, meowing like an alleycat right up in my ear.” “I think I like this Rory.” I narrowed my eyes, but Jamie just grinned. “You think you’re hilarious, don’t you? Do you just sit around and laugh at your own jokes? Do you write them down and re-read them at night?” Jamie laughed, the corners of his eyes crinkling. “As I was saying,” I voiced louder. “She was a little brat. But for some weird reason, she always loved to be in the bathroom with me when I took my baths.” “You take baths?” “You’re seriously missing the point of this story!” “There’s a point to this story?” I huffed, but couldn’t fight the smile on my face. “Yes! The point is, I thought that was our bonding time. Rory would weave around my legs while I undressed and she’d hang out on the side of the tub the entire time I was in the bath, meowing occasionally, pawing at the water. It was kind of cute.” “So you bridged your relationship with your cat during bath time?” “Ah, well see, one would think that. But, one night, that little demon hopped onto the counter and just stared at me. I couldn’t figure out why, but she just wouldn’t stop staring. She kept inching her paw up, setting it back down, inching it up, setting it down. And finally I realized what she was going to do — and she knew I did — because as soon as realization dawned, Rory smiled at me — swear to God — and flipped the light off in the bathroom.” Jamie doubled over that time, and I spoke even louder over his laughter. “I’m terrified of the dark, Jamie! It was awful! And so I jumped up, scrambling to find a towel so I could turn the light back on. But because I’m a genius, I yanked on the shower curtain to help me stand up, but that only took it down and me along with it. I fell straight to the floor, but I broke my fall with my hands instead of my face.” “Luckily.” “Oh,” I chided. “Yeah. So lucky. Except guess where Rory’s litter box was?” Jamie’s eyes widened and he tore his eyes from the road to meet mine. “No!” Ohhh yeah.

Black and white keys on Piano. Several strings on Guitar. Double takes layering and adds lips on Vocals. Kicks, snare, hit hat and cymbals on Drums. The more the dynamic, the more the music sounds good. This should tell you that we can achieve great things when we work together. Musicians' career ends when they start working against each other instead of working together.

Look over yonder, here come the blues, The thirteenth of anytime, just like a fool. A double-breasted green-and-red polka dot coat, Playin' the violin, Hittin' wrong notes. Wow! Look over yonder, he's coming my way, When he's around, I never have a happy day. He give me bad luck by rubbin' his ring, See that? I just broke a guitar string. Look over yonder, he's smiling at my babe, Now she says, she's gonna leave me here today. I don't need bad luck like him hangin' around, He's knockin' at my door, now my house is burning down. (Crackle, crackle…pop, pop.) Look over yonder, this is the end, He just now said he wants to be my friend. When he's around, I can't do nothing right, He's got me wearing shades in the middle of the night. Look over yonder, yeah. Look over yonder, baby. Got to get away, get away from here. Oh! Look over yonder, yeah. (Where's my shotgun so I can blow this fool away? Get away, brother!) Look over yonder, baby…

Modern culture treats sex outside of marriagea as being no big deal. It’s considered completely normal and not something to be ashamed of; if anything, people brag about it and argue that it’s a positive good. It’s described as being a “casual” activity; something you can do with “no strings attached.” You can supposedly have meaningless “hookups,” “one-night stands,” or text your “friends with benefits” to set up a “booty call,” which is probably the most unromantic thing I can even think of. This idea that sex outside of marriage is OK is probably the biggest lie we are told, and the biggest source of our problems—not just in dating, but in all of life. I know that is a bold statement, but consider the evidence: after the so-called “sexual revolution” of the 1960s, divorce rates doubled, followed by an ongoing decline in marriage rates.1 Currently, 40 percent of children in the United States are born out of wedlock, without a stable, married, two-parent family; in the 1960s, at the start of the sexual revolution, that number was just 7 percent.2 Besides those births, there have been 60 million US children killed before birth via abortion since 1973.3 Sexually transmitted diseases (STDs), which would be almost nonexistent if all people were monogamous,b are instead at record highs,4 with something like 20 million new infections in the country each year.5 Pornography use has become so common that it’s just kind of assumed for men but is also regularly consumed by at least a third of all women.6 And then you have all the ways people use and abuse sex as a way to use and abuse other people through either harassment or assault, which is a huge problem: it’s estimated that one in five women are raped at some point in their lives,7 while the majority are either harassed or assaulted in some form.8 Go beyond the statistics and think about how all these things would affect the actual people involved, and all the various costs associated with each one. Add it all up, and the impact both on society and on individual relationships is ridiculously massive.

He awoke unrested, as if he had never slept at all. The potency of his other life drew him. He spent his human days in a fog of discontent and restlessness. He regarded his own existence with disdain. A double curse of weariness dogged him. He longed to sleep, but sleep gave no rest. Yet he desired sleep, not to rest, but to leave his dreary human life behind and immerse himself once more in a draconian world. His life as a man had become a string of weary days.

It also made an impression on Ford, one of the most virulently antiunion of Detroit’s new capitalist class.Yet he was also a financial pragmatist. Tired of losing money to keep the fresh tides of workers trained for only a few weeks’ worth of work—and with an eye toward removing the unionists’ main rallying issue, money—Ford announced in January 1914 a new profit-sharing plan that would boost workers’ pay to $5 for an eight-hour workday.10 That was more than double the $2.25 he had been paying for a nine-hour day. There was a very thick string attached. To qualify for the program, and the job, workers had to allow representatives from Ford’s new Sociological Department to inspect their homes to ensure the workers and their families were living clean lives of frugality and sobriety. They had to meet one of three criteria: be married and living with and taking care of their family; be single and over age twenty-two with “proven thrifty habits”; or under age twenty-two but providing sole support for relatives.11 Thousands were happy to make that trade and went to the Highland Park plant hoping to land one of the jobs. Ford, though, wound up hiring relatively few new workers—the vast majority of those already in the plant accepted the personal intrusions, and the money.

Do you see this string? This string is like an army. Push it from behind, and it doubles up on itself—you get nowhere. To drive it forward you have to pull it from the front, and it will follow you in perfect order.

An odourless poison leaked out of him. His dearest childhood memories were of the practical jokes he had played on the servants. Stringing ropes to trip them up, setting off firecrackers under their beds, unscrewing the seat on the long drop. You could imagine that he had found his vocation in the process. His work, which involved jailing people for petty offences, was a malevolent prank. The way he spoke about it, forced removals, detention without trial, the troops in the townships were simply larger examples of the same mischief. I was struck by the intimacy of his racial obsession. His prejudice was a passion. It caused him an exquisite sort of pain, like worrying a loose tooth with your tongue or scratching a mosquito bite until it bleeds. In the mirror of his stories, however, the perspective was reversed. While he was always hurting someone, doing harm and causing trouble, he saw himself as the victim. All these people he didn’t like, these inferior creatures among whom he was forced to live, made him miserable. It was he who suffered. I understand this better now than I did then. At the time, I was trying to grasp my own part in the machinery of power and more often than not I misjudged the mechanism. Seid Sand, nicht das Öl im Getriebe der Welt, my friend Sabine had told me. Seid unbequem. Be troublesome. Be sand, not oil in the workings of the world. Sand? Must I be ground down to nothing? Should I let myself be milled? It was abject. Surely one could be a spanner in the works rather than a handful of dust? I’d rather be a hammer than a nail. These thoughts were driven from my mind by Louis’s suffering face, the downturned lips, the wincing eyes. Even his crispy hair looked hurt. You could see it squirming as he combed it in the mornings, gazing mournfully at his face in the shaving mirror. I could have shouted at him. ‘Look around you! See how privileged we are. We’ve all eaten ourselves sick, just look at the debris, paper plates full of bones and peels, crumpled serviettes and balls of foil, bloody juices. And yet we haven’t made a dent in the supply.’ The dish on the edge of the fire was full of meat, thick chops and coils of wors soldered to the stainless steel with grease. The fat of the land was still sizzling on the blackened bars of the grill. You would think the feast was about to begin." (from "Double Negative" by Ivan Vladislavic, Teju Cole)

I walked the short distance to Nogizaka, then strolled up and down Gaienhigashi-dori. It took awhile, but I finally spotted it. There was no sign, only a small red rose on a black awning. The entrance was flanked by two black men, each of sufficient bulk to have been at home in the sumo pit. Their suits were well tailored and, given the size of the men wearing them, must have been custom-made. Nigerians, I assumed, whose size, managerial acumen, and relative facility with the language had made them a rare foreign success story, in this case as both middle management and muscle for many of the area’s entertainment establishments. The mizu shobai, or “water trade” of entertainment and pleasure, is one of the few areas in which Japan can legitimately claim a degree of internationalization. They bowed and opened the club’s double glass doors for me, each issuing a baritone irasshaimase as they did so. Welcome. One of them murmured something into a microphone set discreetly into his lapel. I walked down a short flight of stairs. A ruddy-faced, prosperous-looking Japanese man whom I put at about forty greeted me in a small foyer. Interchangeable J-Pop techno music was playing from the room beyond. “Nanmeisama desho ka?” Mr. Ruddy asked. How many? “Just one,” I said in English, holding up a finger. “Of course.” He motioned that I should follow him. The room was rectangular, flanked by dance stages on either end. The stages were simple, distinguished only by mirrored walls behind them and identical brass poles at their centers. One stage was occupied by a tall, long-haired blonde wearing high heels and a green g-string and nothing more. She was dancing somewhat desultorily, I thought, but seemed to have the attention of the majority of the club’s clientele regardless. Russian, I guessed. Large-boned and large-breasted. A delicacy in Japan. Harry hadn’t mentioned floorshows. Probably he was embarrassed. My sense that something was amiss deepened.

Calling to Measure It’s an obsession now, this matching And measuring, comparing, for instance, The coral-violet of the inner lip Of a queen conch to the last rim of dusk On the purple-flowering raspberry To the pure indigo of the bird-voiced Tree frog’s twittering tongue, then converting The result to an accepted standard Of rose-scarlet gradations. It’s difficult to say which is greater- The brevity of the elk’s frosty bellow Or the moments of fog sun-lifted Through fragrances of blue spruce Or the fading flavor in one spoonful Of warm chocolate rum. I mark out space by ten peas Strung on a string. The pane perimeter Of my window, for instance, is twenty-eight Lengths, twelve lengths over. Seventy pea-strings stretch from bed To door, Four go round my neck. My longing for you is more painful Than the six-times folding, doubling And doubling, of a coyote’s Most piercing cry, more inconsolable Than a whole night of moonlight blinded By thunderclouds, more constant Than black at the center of a cavern Stone below leagues of granite. I gauge my cold by the depth Of stillness in the pod heart of a frozen Wren. I time my breath by the faltering Leaves of aspen in wind. I count the circles Of my dizziness by the spreading rings Of rain-lassos on the pond, by the repeating Bell chimes of the corridor clock, By the one unending ring of the horizon. Where is the tablet, where the rule, where The steel weights, the balance, the book, Properly to make measure of a loss So grand and deep I can spread and stitch it To every visible star I name- Arcturus, Spica, Vega, Regulus- in this dark Surrounding dark surrounding dark?

Don’t be fooled by their hypocrisy and double standards. They have no honor, moral standards, ethics, principles or integrity. It is never about right or wrong, but it is about which side they are on, who is paying them and who is also on the payroll. When it is one of their own who does wrong or who commits crime. They will never call them out. Prosecute, judge, arrest, cancel, confront, expose, seek answers or humiliate them. They wont comment or make any statements . They will be silent like nothing happened because they protect each other and protect their interests. When it is not one of their own. All hell will break lose. They would have 24/7 coverage on every news channel or newspaper, on the front pages. Having their own sketchy, bias headline, analysts, experts, professors, influences, investigators, journalists and witnesses. They would even blow it out of proposition. Making remarks and statement seeking answers. Challenging the court ,government and the people. They are all puppets and there is someone pulling the strings. They are all owned by the same master.

Verlaine – “You sound like you’re certain he’s human.” Dazai – “I am. There’s no way I could hate a man-made character string this much.

You’ve always got something ringing against the note or the harmony. Chuck Berry is all double-string stuff. He very rarely plays single notes. The reason that cats started to play like that, T-Bone and so on, was economics—to eliminate the need for a horn section. With an amplified electric guitar, you could play two harmony notes and you could basically save money on two saxophones and a trumpet. And my double-string playing was why, in the very first Sidcup days, I was looked on as a bit of a wild rock and roller, and not really a serious blues player. Everybody else was playing away on single strings. It worked for me because I was playing a lot by myself, so two strings were better than one. And it had the possibility of getting this dissonance and this rhythm thing going, which you can’t do picking away on one string. It’s finding the moves. Chords are something to look for. There’s always the Lost Chord. Nobody’s found it.

Why don’t you have a history?” Mr. Smith smiled thinly. “I’m just not very memorable, sir. Afraid I’m quite boring, really. No life outside the office.” He held up a business card. “Will you consider our offer? Call me, day or night. No strings attached.

Min has brought me a present of my own. It is a shiny pink apron. On the apron there are words, curling white and maggoty letters: 'Little lady'. Min holds the apron in front of my face until I am forced to look at it. She slips the string over my head and ties the back securely with a double knot.

Hear the good news. Whatever your story: The hurt you can’t let go of. The gossip and backbiting and double-talk. The forgiveness you withheld until it was too late. The doubts that linger. The disappointments you still resent. The relationship you let fester. The lies you tell to shroud your addiction. The truth you’re too cowardly to come out with. The handout you withheld. The frustration that others aren’t as faithful as you. The gift you gave with strings attached. The if-bombs you throw down as conditions of your love. The prodigal you won’t welcome home. The prejudice. The self-righteousness and sanctimony that feels good for a second—especially when it’s about politics—but then it sticks on you like a bad smell on your shoe. The secret you keep hidden in the dark corner closet of your heart. Whatever your story—what story? Christ Jesus has set you free from that story by becoming that story for you.

Down this height we pitched the hides, throwing them as far out into the air as we could; and as they were all large, stiff, and doubled, like the cover of a book, the wind took them, and they swayed and eddied about, plunging and rising in the air, like a kite when it has broken its string. As it was now low tide, there was no danger of their falling into the water, and as fast as they came to ground, the men below picked them up, and taking them on their heads, walked off with them to the boat. It was really a picturesque sight: the great height; the scaling of the hides; and the continual walking to and fro of the men, who looked like mites, on the beach! This was the romance of hide-droghing!

Nowhere in all this elaborate brain circuitry, alas, is there the equivalent of the chip found in a five-dollar calculator. This deficiency can make learning that terrible quartet—“Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision,” as Lewis Carroll burlesqued them—a chore. It’s not so bad at first. Our number sense endows us with a crude feel for addition, so that, even before schooling, children can find simple recipes for adding numbers. If asked to compute 2 + 4, for example, a child might start with the first number and then count upward by the second number: “two, three is one, four is two, five is three, six is four, six.” But multiplication is another matter. It is an “unnatural practice,” Dehaene is fond of saying, and the reason is that our brains are wired the wrong way. Neither intuition nor counting is of much use, and multiplication facts must be stored in the brain verbally, as strings of words. The list of arithmetical facts to be memorized may be short, but it is fiendishly tricky: the same numbers occur over and over, in different orders, with partial overlaps and irrelevant rhymes. (Bilinguals, it has been found, revert to the language they used in school when doing multiplication.) The human memory, unlike that of a computer, has evolved to be associative, which makes it ill-suited to arithmetic, where bits of knowledge must be kept from interfering with one another: if you’re trying to retrieve the result of multiplying 7 X 6, the reflex activation of 7 + 6 and 7 X 5 can be disastrous. So multiplication is a double terror: not only is it remote from our intuitive sense of number; it has to be internalized in a form that clashes with the evolved organization of our memory. The result is that when adults multiply single-digit numbers they make mistakes ten to fifteen per cent of the time. For the hardest problems, like 7 X 8, the error rate can exceed twenty-five per cent. Our inbuilt ineptness when it comes to more complex mathematical processes has led Dehaene to question why we insist on drilling procedures like long division into our children at all. There is, after all, an alternative: the electronic calculator. “Give a calculator to a five-year-old, and you will teach him how to make friends with numbers instead of despising them,” he has written. By removing the need to spend hundreds of hours memorizing boring procedures, he says, calculators can free children to concentrate on the meaning of these procedures, which is neglected under the educational status quo.

Like Miles Davis, Graham often used to turn his back on his audiences. This was primarily between songs, while he was retuning his guitars. For Graham, in the early 1960s, was privy to a secret alternative tuning system known as DADGAD, which he was reluctant to share with any rival guitarists in the crowd. He began using it around 1962–3, on a trip to the bohemian Beat capital Tangier, where he spent six months and earned his keep by working in a snack booth selling hash cakes to locals. The raw Gnaoua trance music preserved in Morocco’s town squares and remote Rif mountain villages stretched back thousands of years, and Graham was hypnotised by the oud, a large Arabic lute which resembles a bisected pear (the word ‘lute’ itself derives from the Arabic ‘al-ud’) and has been identified in Mesopotamian wall paintings 5,000 years old. The paradigm of Eastern music, defining its difference from the West, is the maqam, which uses a microtonal system that blasts open the Western eight-note octave into fifty-three separate intervals. DADGAD is not one of the tunings commonly used on the eleven-string oud, but Graham found that tuning a Western guitar that way made it easier to slip into jam sessions with Moroccan players. The configuration allows scales and chords to be created without too much complicated fingering; its doubled Ds and As and open strings often lead to more of a harp-like, droning sonority than the conventional EADGBE.

It had been approaching midnight. I'd been hanging out longer than I'd planned when a 1928 Lincoln Model L-swanky by any definition-pulled in near the club's entrance and double-parked alongside the string of other black vehicles. Two heavily garbed figures emerged, one with a cigar implanted between his teeth. Fat lips forced it to the side of his mouth. Someone came out of the club, and the three of them moved into the shadows.

you really want to use single or double quotes to surround a string in Python, instead of three single quotes, you can add a backslash (\) before each quotation mark within the string. This is called escaping.

Brian Wecht was born in New Jersey to an interfaith couple. His father ran an army-navy store and enjoyed going to Vegas to see Elvis and Sinatra. Brian loved school, especially math and science, but also loved jazz saxophone and piano. “A large part of my identity came from being a fat kid who was bullied through most of my childhood,” he said. “I remember just not having many friends.” Brian double majored in math and music and chose graduate school in jazz composition. But when his girlfriend moved to San Diego, he quit and enrolled in a theoretical physics program at UC San Diego. Six months later the relationship failed; six years later he earned a PhD. When he solved a longstanding open problem in string theory (“the exact superconformal R-symmetry of any 4d SCFT”), Brian became an international star and earned fellowships at MIT, Harvard, and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. He secured an unimaginable job: a lifetime professorship in particle physics in London. He was set. Except. Brian never lost his interest in music. He met his wife while playing for an improv troupe. He started a comedic band with his friend Dan called Ninja Sex Party. “I was always afraid it was going to bite me in the ass during faculty interviews because I dressed up like a ninja and sang about dicks and boning.” By the time Brian got to London, the band’s videos were viral sensations. He cried on the phone with Dan: Should they try to turn their side gig into a living? Brian and his wife had a daughter by this point. The choice seemed absurd. “You can’t quit,” his physics adviser said. “You’re the only one of my students who got a job.” His wife was supportive but said she couldn’t decide for him. If I take the leap and it fails, he thought, I may be fucking up my entire future for this weird YouTube career. He also thought, If I don’t jump, I’ll look back when I’m seventy and say, “Fuck, I should have tried.” Finally, he decided: “I’d rather live with fear and failure than safety and regret.” Brian and his family moved to Los Angeles. When the band’s next album was released, Ninja Sex Party was featured on Conan, profiled in the Washington Post, and reached the top twenty-five on the Billboard charts. They went on a sold-out tour across the country, including the Brooklyn Bowl in Las Vegas.

warning bell in Sam’s head. Man-eating sharks and Bigfoot forgotten, he paused and gave her a considering look. “Are you in some sort of trouble?” A sharp titter of patently false laughter erupted from her throat, reinforcing Sam’s suspicions. Giving him a don’t-be-silly look, she reached up and twisted a coil of gold hair around her finger. “T-trouble?” she stuttered. “No, of course not. Why would you think that?” “I don’t know…” Sam trailed off absently. A broken string with a few tiny pearls lay next to the curve of her breast. A breast he shouldn’t have been looking at, but… Puzzled, Sam frowned. Noticing the direction of his gaze, she blushed and jerked her arm down. “As an added incentive, I’ll