Tags To Use For Quotes

They stick you with those names, those labels -- ‘rebel’ or whatever; whatever they like to use. Because they need a label; they need a name. They need something to put the price tag on the back of.

Every life has a soundtrack. There is a tune that makes me think of the summer I spent rubbing baby oil on my stomach in pursuit of the perfect tan. There's another that reminds me of tagging along with my father on Sunday morning to pick up the New York Times. There's the song that reminds me of using fake ID to get into a nightclub; and the one that brings back my cousin Isobel's sweet sixteen, where I played Seven Minutes in Heaven with a boy whose breath smelled like tomato soup. If you ask me, music is the language of memory.

Do not resent your place in the story. Do not imagine yourself elsewhere. Do not close your eyes and picture a world without thorns, without shadows, without hawks. Change this world. Use your body like a tool meant to be used up, discarded, and replaced. Better every life you touch. We will reach the final chapter. When we have eyes that can stare into the sun, eyes that only squint for the Shenikah, then we will see laughing children pulling cobras by their tails, and hawks and rabbits playing tag.

Clay, if anyone followed anyone, it was me tagging along after you. I didn’t dare order you around.” “Load of shit,” he muttered, but she thought she heard a softening in his tone. “You fucking made me attend tea parties.” She remembered his threat before the first one: “Tell anyone and I’ll eat you and use your bones as toothpicks.” ~ Talin and Clay dialogue

Graham had a lot of trouble with taste. Often his thoughts were not tasty. There were no effective partitions in his mind. What he saw and learned touched everything else he knew. Some of the combinations were hard to live with. But he could not anticipate them, could not block and repress. His learned values of decency and propriety tagged along, shocked at his associations, appalled at his dreams; sorry that in the bone arena of his skull there were no forts for what he loved. His associations came at the speed of light. His value judgments were at the pace of a responsive reading. They could never keep up and direct his thinking. He viewed his own mentality as grotesque but useful, like a chair made of antlers. There was nothing he could do about it.

He stood up. "Let's go." The sun spilling through the window hit his chest, making his bare skin look even more golden. "That's okay," she sputtered. "You don't have to...tag along." "Yes, I do. I'm your shadow until after breakfast." Oh great. Her gaze slipped down to his open shirt again. Was she going to have to look, or try not to look, at his chest all morning? "Then at least button your shirt." The words were out before she realised how that sounded. The disappointment in his eyes vanished and a sexy twinkle took its place. The twinkle brought out the gold flecks in his irises, which she used to admire so much. "Why?" he asked. "Does it bother you?" She glared at him. "Don't go there.

War has changed. It's no longer about nations, ideologies, or ethnicity. It's an endless series of proxy battles, fought by mercenaries and machines. War--and it's consumption of life--has become a well-oiled machine. War has changed. ID-tagged soldiers carry ID-tagged weapons, use ID-tagged gear. Nanomachines inside their bodies enhance and regulate their abilities. Genetic control, information control, emotion control, battlefield control…everything is monitored and kept under control. War…has changed. The age of deterrence has become the age of control, all in the name of averting catastrophe from weapons of mass destruction, and he who controls the battlefield, controls history. War…has changed. When the battlefield is under total control, war becomes routine.

Nobel Prize winner Arthur Schawlow invented the laser in 1957 and, sure, lasers were used in the lunar landing and they have medical and military purposes, but I think we can all agree that their best application is laser pointers and laser tag.

Ish #1 "It's not your mama's macaroni and cheese if you used spaghetti noodles.

My life used to be like that game of freeze tag we played as kids. Once tagged, you had to freeze in the situation you are in. Whenever something happened, I'd freeze like a statue, too afraid of moving the wrong way, too afraid of making the wrong decision. The problem is, if you stand still too long, that's your decision. When in doubt, do the next right thing.

I said, "Jesse, don't flatter yourself that I did this for you. I mean, it has been nothing but one giant pain in the neck, having you for a roommate. Do you think I like having to come home from school or from work or whatever and having to explain stuff like the Bay of Pigs to you? Believe me, life with you is no picnic." He didn't say anything. He just kept pulling me along. "Or what about Tad?" I said, bringing up what I knew was a sore subject. "I mean, you think I like having you tag along on my dates? Having you out of my life is going to make things a lot simpler, so don't think, you know, I did this for you. I only did it because that stupid cat of yours has been crying its head off. And also because anything I can do to make your stupid girlfriend mad, I will." "Nombre de Dios, Susannah," Jesse muttered. "Maria's not my girlfriend." "Well, she certainly used to be," I said. "And what about that, anyway? That girl is a full-on skank, Jesse. I can't believe you ever agreed to marry her. I mean, what were you thinking, anyway? Couldn't you see what she was like underneath all that lace?

...To allow the market mechanism to be sole director of the fate of human beings and their natural environment, indeed, even of the amount and use of purchasing power, would result in the demolition of society. For the alleged commodity, "labor power" cannot be shoved about, used indiscriminately, or even left unused, without affecting the human individual who happens to be the bearer of this peculiar commodity. In disposing of a man's labor power the system would, incidentally, dispose of the physical, psychological, and moral entity of "man" attached to the tag. Robbed of the protective covering of cultural institutions, human beings would perish from the the effects of social exposure; they would die as the victims of acute social dislocation through vice, perversion, crime, and starvation. Nature would be reduced to its elements, neighborhoods and landscapes defiled, rovers polluted, military safety jeopardized, the power to produce food and raw materials destroyed...

Everybody gets a tag. If you listen to a Velvet Underground record, you don't think, 'Godfathers of Punk.' You just think, 'This sounds great.' The tags are there in order to help try to sell something by giving it a name that's going to stick in somebody's memory. But it doesn't describe it. So 'depressing' isn't a word I would use to describe my music. But there is some sadness in it -- there has to be, so that the happiness in it will matter.

If the farmer is rich, then so is the nation.

It isn't. when you come to think of it a quite respectable trade, the detection of the innocent, for aren't lovers nearly always innocent? They have committed no crime, they are certain in their own minds that they have done no wrong, 'as long as no one but myself is hurt', the old tag is ready on their lips, and love, of course, excuses everything -- so they believe and so I used to believe in the days when I loved.

It was back home that The Northern Lights cast these wondrous rainbows in the snow, and where Snugs used to play tag with the huge curtain of shining light that ran, even faster than the wind, across the vast snow-covered landscape.

A fist of lust howled inside him. If she looked back, she’d see a big fucking bulge in his jeans. She called him sir. He was no one’s sir. He’d told her a million times to call him Tag. His dirty mind took him to places he should be ashamed of visiting, while listening to her husk Sir at him in different scenarios. Yeah, Prince Charming had a filthy imagination, and he’d used it on her more than he should.

People are tagged with other labels that point to the lowest-status group they belong to, as in "woman doctor" or "black writer," but never "white lawyer" or male senator". Any category that lowers our status relative to others' can be used to mark us; to be privileged is to go through life with the relative ease of being unmarked.

Double-zap,” said Tag. “That is not a technical term, I hope,” murmured Asil. “Only the most technically advanced people can use ‘double-zap’ correctly,” Anna told Asil sotto voce. “You and I shouldn’t try it.

Look at them. Where are they looking? They're not looking at each other, they're not looking at the art on the wall or the sun in the sky; they're looking at their phones. They hang on to every beep and alert and tweet and status update. I don't want to be that. I'm distracted enough as it is by the actual, tangible, physical world. I've embraced the efficiency of a desktop PC for work and research, and I even use a laptop on my own time, but I draw the line at a cell phone. If I want social media, I'll join a book club. I will not be collared and leashed and tracked like a tagged orca in the ocean.

Don't always use prudence for precaution, sometimes use it for progress.

I will do everything I can to be the man that you want, the man that the seven-year-old you used to dream about. I will bring you flowers, I’ll take care of you when you’re sick, I’ll give you space when you need it and I’ll never leave your side when you want someone there. I want to be better than I am because of you, Paisley.

So there are pics of Tucker’s mighty wang on the internet?” “I haven’t been tagged on Instagram yet, so I’m hopeful they aren’t out there. But thanks for calling my dick mighty. We appreciate that.” Amusement colors his words. “We? As in you and your penis?” “Yup,” he says cheerfully. I snuggle deeper under the covers. “You have a name for your penis?” “Doesn’t everyone? Guys put a name on everything that’s important to them—cars, dicks. One of my teammates in junior hockey named his stick, which was dumb because sticks break all the time. He’d gone through twelve of them by the end of the season.” “What were the names?” “That’s the thing. He just kept adding a number to the end, like iPhone 6, iPhone 7, except in his case it was Henrietta 1, Henrietta 2, et cetera.” I snicker. “He should’ve used the hurricane naming convention.” “Darlin’, he wasn’t smart enough to come up with two names, let alone twelve.

He moved forward cautiously. He circled it, sniffed it, whapped it with a paw. Then he found the product tag and stared at it for a minute. Turning toward her, he lifted a lip in something that might have been a sneer. "I know it says it's a dog bed, but I'm sure a Wolf can use it," Meg said. Nothing but grumbly sounds from the Wolf. "Fine. If you want to lie on a cold, hard floor instead of something comfy and warm just because Wolf is spelled d-o-g, you go right ahead.

To a farmer dirt is not a waste, it is wealth.

The Stasi had used radiation to mark people and objects it wanted to track. It developed a range of radioactive tags including irradiated pins it could surreptitiously insert into a person’s clothing, radioactive magnets to place on cars, and radioactive pellets to shoot into tyres.

As far as I could see, she didn't take any better care of her apparel than I did mine, but I owned shirts that looked like they'd been run through a car engine half an hour after I removed the price tags, and she had socks from high school that were still as white as palace linen. Women and their clothes often astounded me this way, but I figured it was one of those mysteries I'd never solve - like what really happened to Amelia Earhart or the bell that used to occupy our office.

The almost-35-year-old Terry Schmidt had very nearly nothing left anymore of the delusion that he differed from the great herd of the common run of men, not even in his despair at not making a difference or in the great hunger to have an impact that in his late twenties he'd clung to as evidence that even though he was emerging as sort of a failure the grand ambitions against which he judged himself a failure were somehow exceptional and superior to the common run's - not anymore, since now even the phrase Make A Difference had become a platitude so familiar that it was used as the mnemonic tag in low-budget Ad Council PSAs for Big Brothers/Big Sisters and the United Way, which used Make a Difference in a Child's Life and Making a Difference in Your Community respectively, with B.B./B.S. even acquiring the telephonic equivalent of DIF-FER-ENCE to serve as their Volunteer Hotline number in the metro area.

When we sat down in the plane, Clare took something out of her pocket and handed it to me. It looked like a tube of lipstick. I frowned at her. 'Is this really the time to swap make-up?' I asked. She grinned. 'It's a hand taser. My parents make me carry one.' She took the cap off and pointed to the metal edge. 'If someone attacks you, you press the tip against their skin and it shoots out a charge.' I looked down at it. 'Does it last long?' She shook her head. 'It's pretty harmless. Noah and Pat used to play taser tag around the house when I was growing up.

When it first emerged, Twitter was widely derided as a frivolous distraction that was mostly good for telling your friends what you had for breakfast. Now it is being used to organize and share news about the Iranian political protests, to provide customer support for large corporations, to share interesting news items, and a thousand other applications that did not occur to the founders when they dreamed up the service in 2006. This is not just a case of cultural exaptation: people finding a new use for a tool designed to do something else. In Twitter's case, the users have been redesigning the tool itself. The convention of replying to another user with the @ symbol was spontaneously invented by the Twitter user base. Early Twitter users ported over a convention from the IRC messaging platform and began grouping a topic or event by the "hash-tag" as in "#30Rock" or "inauguration." The ability to search a live stream of tweets - which is likely to prove crucial to Twitter's ultimate business model, thanks to its advertising potential - was developed by another start-up altogether. Thanks to these innovations, following a live feed of tweets about an event - political debates or Lost episodes - has become a central part of the Twitter experience. But for the first year of Twitter's existence, that mode of interaction would have been technically impossible using Twitter. It's like inventing a toaster oven and then looking around a year later and discovering that all your customers have, on their own, figured out a way to turn it into a microwave.

People get educated in different ways; some at home, some in the wilderness, some in playgrounds, some during tragedies, some by the stories of their grandparents, and some at school. It's unfortunate that we only use the tag of 'educated' for those who enrol in factory-like institutions.

for aren’t lovers nearly always innocent? They have committed no crime, they are certain in their own minds that they have done no wrong, ‘as long as no one but myself is hurt’, the old tag is ready on their lips, and love, of course, excuses everything—so they believe, and so I used to believe in the days when I loved.

You may wonder why all children don’t make up wonderfully positive role-selves—why so many people are acting out roles of failure, anger, mental disturbance, emotional volatility, or other forms of misery. One answer is that not every child has the inner resources to be successful and self-controlled in interactions with others. Some children’s genetics and neurology propel them into impulsive reactivity instead of constructive action. Another reason negative role-selves arise is that it’s common for emotionally immature parents to subconsciously use different children in the family to express unresolved aspects of their own role-self and healing fantasies. For instance, one child may be idealized and indulged as the perfect child, while another is tagged as incompetent, always screwing up and needing help.

instead.” “Do you really have to curse so much? And are you serious when you use terms like hit the pavement? This isn’t a movie or one of those weekly cop shows. Policemen and women, and investigators like Lizzy, don’t need to ‘hit the pavement’ now that so much information is at their fingertips. It’s not stupid. It’s life in the modern world. Pretty soon they won’t need to chase after criminals in high-speed chases either. The police will tag a car with a laser-guided GPS tracking system. Once the transmitter is attached to the fleeing car, the police can track the suspect over a wireless network, then hang back and let the crook believe he’s outrun

Tag, you know ‘half-and-half’ is a pejorative use of an ableist term,” Jett chastises. “Both the minotaur contingent and the centaur contingent find it highly offensive –

You see, people hang labels, tags of false identification, on the people that disturb their own sense of reality too much, like the bells that used to be hung on the necks of lepers.

Businessmen and admen and agents like me, we just do it a little more openly, with the price tag in almost full view. And do you know who uses each other most savagely of all? Lovers! Loving is using.

Wrong Planet people tend to dress slightly differently from Rag, Tag & Bobtail. My son, Kai, always used to say that I have my own swag, meaning that my style of clothing is different from a lot of people. Not radically so, I’m not completely outrageous – although I’ve probably had my moments – but my clothes are often quite different from everybody else’s, who for the most part socialise in the same kind of shirts they wear to work. I was wearing shirts or jackets 20 years ago that are only just starting to come into fashion nowadays. I can’t explain this, I’m hardly a trend-setter, just that I’ve always liked that style.

I’m not sure how the ponies happened, though I have an inkling: “Can I get you anything?” I’ll say, getting up from a dinner table, “Coffee, tea, a pony?” People rarely laugh at this, especially if they’ve heard it before. “This party’s ‘sposed to be fun,” a friend will say. “Really? Will there be pony rides?” It’s a nervous tic and a cheap joke, cheapened further by the frequency with which I use it. For that same reason, it’s hard to weed it out of my speech – most of the time I don’t even realize I’m saying it. There are little elements in a person’s life, minor fibers that become unintentionally tangled with your personality. Sometimes it’s a patent phrase, sometimes it’s a perfume, sometimes it’s a wristwatch. For me, it is the constant referencing of ponies. I don’t even like ponies. If I made one of my throwaway equine requests and someone produced an actual pony, Juan-Valdez-style, I would run very fast in the other direction. During a few summers at camp, I rode a chronically dehydrated pony named Brandy who would jolt down without notice to lick the grass outside the corral and I would careen forward, my helmet tipping to cover my eyes. I do, however, like ponies on the abstract. Who doesn’t? It’s like those movies with the animated insects. Sure, the baby cockroach seems cute with CGI eyelashes, but how would you feel about fifty of her real-life counterparts living in your oven? And that’s precisely the manner in which the ponies clomped their way into my regular speech: abstractly. “I have something for you,” a guy will say on our first date. “Is it a pony?” No. It’s usually a movie ticket or his cell phone number. But on our second date, if I ask again, I’m pretty sure I’m getting a pony. And thus the Pony drawer came to be. It’s uncomfortable to admit, but almost every guy I have ever dated has unwittingly made a contribution to the stable. The retro pony from the ‘50s was from the most thoughtful guy I have ever known. The one with the glitter horseshoes was from a boy who would later turn out to be straight somehow, not gay. The one with the rainbow haunches was from a librarian, whom I broke up with because I felt the chemistry just wasn’t right, and the one with the price tag stuck on the back was given to me by a narcissist who was so impressed with his gift he forgot to remover the sticker. Each one of them marks the beginning of a new relationship. I don’t mean to hint. It’s not a hint, actually, it’s a flat out demand: I. Want. A. Pony. I think what happens is that young relationships are eager to build up a romantic repertoire of private jokes, especially in the city where there’s not always a great “how we met” story behind every great love affair. People meet at bars, through mutual friends, on dating sites, or because they work in the same industry. Just once a coworker of mine, asked me out between two stops on the N train. We were holding the same pole and he said, “I know this sounds completely insane, bean sprout, but would you like to go to a very public place with me and have a drink or something...?” I looked into his seemingly non-psycho-killing, rent-paying, Sunday Times-subscribing eyes and said, “Sure, why the hell not?” He never bought me a pony. But he didn’t have to, if you know what I mean.

One possibility is just to tag along with the fantasists in government and industry who would have us believe that we can pursue our ideals of affluence, comfort, mobility, and leisure indefinitely. This curious faith is predicated on the notion that we will soon develop unlimited new sources of energy: domestic oil fields, shale oil, gasified coal, nuclear power, solar energy, and so on. This is fantastical cause the basic cause of the energy crisis is not scarcity; it is moral ignorance and weakness of character. We don't know how to use energy, or what to use it for. And we cannot restrain ourselves. Our time is characterized as much by the abuse and waste of human energy as it is by the abuse and waste of fossil fuel energy. Nuclear power, if we are to believe its advocates, is presumably going to be well used by the same mentality that has egregiously devalued and misapplied man- and womanpower. If we had an unlimited supply of solar or wind power, we would use that destructively, too, for the same reasons.

A new car becomes a used car the day after you’ve bought it. In the same way, your possessions continue to lose value with the passage of time. Though we tend to put high price tags on our belongings, we should try to think objectively about their true value when they’re turned over to other people.

EVERY WEDNESDAY, I teach an introductory fiction workshop at Harvard University, and on the first day of class I pass out a bullet-pointed list of things the students should try hard to avoid. Don’t start a story with an alarm clock going off. Don’t end a story with the whole shebang having been a suicide note. Don’t use flashy dialogue tags like intoned or queried or, God forbid, ejaculated. Twelve unbearably gifted students are sitting around the table, and they appreciate having such perimeters established. With each variable the list isolates, their imaginations soar higher. They smile and nod. The mood in the room is congenial, almost festive with learning. I feel like a very effective teacher; I can practically hear my course-evaluation scores hitting the roof. Then, when the students reach the last point on the list, the mood shifts. Some of them squint at the words as if their vision has gone blurry; others ask their neighbors for clarification. The neighbor will shake her head, looking pale and dejected, as if the last point confirms that she should have opted for that aseptic-surgery class where you operate on a fetal pig. The last point is: Don’t Write What You Know. The idea panics them for two reasons. First, like all writers, the students have been encouraged, explicitly or implicitly, for as long as they can remember, to write what they know, so the prospect of abandoning that approach now is disorienting. Second, they know an awful lot. In recent workshops, my students have included Iraq War veterans, professional athletes, a minister, a circus clown, a woman with a pet miniature elephant, and gobs of certified geniuses. They are endlessly interesting people, their lives brimming with uniquely compelling experiences, and too often they believe those experiences are what equip them to be writers. Encouraging them not to write what they know sounds as wrongheaded as a football coach telling a quarterback with a bazooka of a right arm to ride the bench. For them, the advice is confusing and heartbreaking, maybe even insulting. For me, it’s the difference between fiction that matters only to those who know the author and fiction that, well, matters.

Pentecostals also used sarcasm to gouge their enemies. [Charles] Parham led the way, challenging a local Baptist antagonist who routinely tagged his name with Ph.D., D.D., and LL.D. to come by and spend a week at Parham's school. When God was finished with him, Parham promised, he would want to add 'A.S.S.' to the list.

As Harris argues, these companies didn’t invest the massive resources necessary to perfect this auto-tagging feature because it was somehow crucial to their social network’s usefulness. They instead made this investment so they could significantly increase the amount of addictive nuggets of social approval that their apps could deliver to their users.

You know,” she said, and from her tone he knew something was coming, “I used to wonder how come you never brought any trouts home. Always said you caught plenty. So one time I got your creel case open the night before you went on one a your little trips—price tag still on it after five years—and I tied a note on the end of the line. It said, ‘Hello, Ennis, bring some fish home, love, Alma.’ And then you come back and said you’d caught a bunch a browns and ate them up. Remember? I looked in the case when I got a chance and there was my note still tied there and that line hadn’t touched water in its life.” As though the word “water” had called out its domestic cousin, she twisted the faucet, sluiced the plates.

pole. I can’t have my girls on the pole, man. Chris Rock was right. I got a mission in life now and it’s keeping my baby girls away from skeevy dudes who go to strip clubs.” “You used to go to strip clubs.” “Exactly. No way I want my baby girls around any dude like me. Or you. Or Alex’s kid. I see the way he looks at my girls.” Tag eyed him as though sizing him up.

Back home, I went to my closet and pulled out the old engineer’s transit case stored there. When we were kids, Emma and I had found it in the attic, dusty and empty, and the leather strap used to carry it had a small cut in it. The tag on the top of the wooden-hinged lid read Circa 1907. It was mostly weatherproof and offered plenty of room for the things I valued—like books.

We become “possessed” by the principality and power when we internalize the spirituality of the system and the practices, beliefs, attitudes, habits, values, expectations, norms, and traditions of the system become the sources we use to form our own identity. And while the tag “possession” might seem extreme, it does help us name something more clearly, something left out of our descriptions at the start of the chapter regarding the ill effects associated with our service to the powers. Specifically, we previously noted how the powers can make us harried, stressed, and rivalrous. But it’s a bit worse than all that. It’s not just that the powers push us around from the outside with demands, deadlines, and expectations. The powers also affect (and infect) us from the inside. A focus on service— how we work and make sacrifices for the institution— tends to miss how we often internalize the spirituality of the institution, how our identity becomes formed by and fused with the institution. A focus on service and work (though important) tends to be too behavioral in nature to capture how the institution gets inside us, inhabiting our hearts and minds and affecting how we see ourselves, others, and the world around us.

Country Future Index. It’s an alternative to the GNP measurement, taking into account debt, political stability, environmental health and the like. A useful cross-check on the GNP, and it helps tag countries that could use our help. We identify those, go to them and offer them a massive capital investment, plus political advice, security, whatever they need. In return we take custody of their bioinfrastructure.

So once the zookeeper realized it was the monkeys who stole the bananas, he knew there was only one way he'd be able to get them back." "How?" I whispered. My throat was so sore. "Don't talk. He had to beat them in shuffleboard, of course." "What?" "I said don't talk. Monkeys love shuffleboard." He used a page from a homework assignment he'd failed and a stack of quarters to make a shuffleboard court. I watched the monkeys and the zookeepers have their showdown while I sipped the last of my applejuice. "Need more?" Graham asked me without looking up, when my straw skidded against the dry bottom of the box. "Uh uh." "You're supposed to drink juice." "I just drank some." "More, though." I shook my head. "Drink more juice or the monkeys are going to kill you. The only thing they love more than shuffleboard is beating up dehydrated sick boys.

Tags [distinctive agent features observable by other agents] almost always define the network by delimiting the critical interactions, the major connections. Tags acquire this role because the adaptive processes that modify cas [complex adaptive systems] select for tags that mediate useful interactions and against tags that cause malfunctions. That is, agents with useful tags spread, while agents with malfunctioning tags cease to exist.

I should count myself most fortunate..." Swann was beginning, a trifle pompously, when the Doctor broke in derisively. Having once heard it said, and never having forgotten that in general conversation emphasis and the use of formal expressions were out of date, whenever he heard a solemn word used seriously, as the word 'fortunate' had been used just now by Swann, he at once assumed that the speaker was being deliberately pedantic. And if, moreover, the same word happened to occur, also, in what he called an old 'tag' or 'saw,' however common it might still be in current usage, the Doctor jumped to the conclusion that the whole thing was a joke, and interrupted with the remaining words of the quotation, which he seemed to charge the speaker with having intended to introduce at that point, although in reality it had never entered his mind. "Most fortunate for France!" he recited wickedly, shooting up both arms with great vigour.

Hannah was his, too, yes, except that she had Rachel’s straight blond hair and narrow blue eyes and sharp nose—her whole face an accusation, just like her mother’s. But she had a specific kind of sarcasm that was a characteristic of the Fleishman side. At least she once did. Her parents’ separation seemed to ignite in her a humorlessness and a fury that had already been coming either because her parents fought too often and too viciously, or because she was becoming a teenager and her hormones created a rage in her. Or because she didn’t have a phone and Lexi Leffer had a phone. Or because she had a Facebook account she was only allowed to use on the computer in the living room and she didn’t even want that Facebook account because Facebook was for old people. Or because Toby suggested that the sneakers that looked just like Keds but were $12 less were preferable to the Keds since again they were exactly the same just without the blue tag on the back and what about being too-overt victims of consumerism?

Get out, Heath.” “Why do you call him that?” she asks. “You already know that, Honey-girl. Sleep. Heath, get the fuck out of my house.” “The idiot used to wear a name tag that said Cash, so when he’d ask ‘cash or credit’ to hot women checking out, and they said ‘cash’ it was like … you know. They were saying they wanted him. Shockingly? That crap worked. You know how many women this asshole has banged in the stockroom or the … okay he’s looking at me like he wants to kill me, so success has been achieved. I should probably get going.

The term ‘political correctness’ has evolved out of the Marxist and Freudian philosophies of the 1930s to become a tool for multicultural-ism, multisexualism, multitheism, and multi-anythingism. It was created to discourage bias and prejudiced thinking that discriminates against an individual or group. It has become society’s way of not offending anyone, whether it is an individual, a group, or a nation. In many instances, however, it is a simple, disarming way of ignoring or deflecting the truth about a situation. Today, the use of political correctness has become so abused that anyone who voices his or her opinion contrary to ‘politically correct think’ is immediately tagged with some form of disparaging label, such as racist and bigot. This exploitation has gotten so out of control that this name-calling accusation is used as a simple and mindless means to manipulate academic, social, or political discussion. The result is a social paranoia which discourages free thought and expression. It’s like living in a totalitarian state in which you are afraid to say what you think. Now who wants to suffer that? So people keep quiet. Their opinions are held captive to fear. How handy for the Islamo-fascists, the American-hating, Jew-killing, Israel-destroying, women-abusing, multireligious-intolerant Muslims. Oh! Excuse me. Did I say something not quite PC? This social paranoia is similar to the attitude that developed in the late 1980s and 1990s, when people became so concerned about children’s self-esteem that failure could not be acknowledged or misbehavior corrected. ‘Now, let’s not hurt their feelings’ was the standard approach. This degree of concern led to teachers giving passing grades for poor performance and youth sport activities where no one kept score. And what has been the fallout of all that psychobabble? High school kids who can’t read their diploma or make change for a dollar, internationally embarrassing scholastic performance scores, and young adults ill equipped to face the competitive lifestyle the world has to offer. They are left watching the television show The Apprentice, not competing to be an apprentice. America got itself into a mess by not upholding the high standards and expectations it once had, instead giving in to mediocrity; and we’re getting into a mess now with political correctness.

Our minds are fucking strong, they are our most powerful weapon, but we have stopped using them. We have access to so many more resources today than ever before and yet we are so much less capable than those who came before us. If you want to be one of the few to defy those trends in our ever-softening society, you will have to be willing to go to war with yourself and create a whole new identity, which requires an open mind. It’s funny, being open minded is often tagged as new age or soft. Fuck that. Being open minded enough to find a way is old school. It’s what knuckle draggers do. And that’s exactly what I did.

I groan and tear down her pants and rip off her panties in one go. She squeals, but I cover her mouth with mine and nudge her legs aside. She hungrily accepts me as I step closer, her fingers desperately grasping at my pants, trying to shove them down. I help her a little, tagging off the button and zipping myself down. She quickly manages to tug down my pants and boxer shorts at the same time until my cock pops free, bouncing up and down with need. She’s still enamored by the size, and I can honestly say I’ll never get used to how good it makes me feel. I grab a condom from my back pocket, rip it open, and quickly put it on.

That’s why it is so dangerous to use infatuation as a sign to pursue a relationship. If you and I don’t know the difference between infatuation and love, we are destined to make some of the dumbest and most regrettable decisions we’ll ever make. These bad decisions come with heavy and painful price tags. So you see, it’s imperative in this tricky business of “falling in love” that we take the time to clearly define what we mean by the word “love.” The investment will pay off handsomely. We can actually learn how to avoid future relational baggage and how to recognize authentic love relationships when we clarify two crucial issues: (1) what love is, and (2) what the difference is between love and infatuation.

The definition of the word ‘racist’ has evolved…or devolved…or, more accurately, ballooned…over the course of my lifetime. It used to be that a ‘racist’ was simply someone who hated others for their skin color. By that definition, I am not, nor have I ever been, a racist. People give you plenty of reasons to hate them before you even have to consider their melanin levels. Most people I’ve hated have been white—especially the ones who play an infantile, morally hierarchical, status-jockeying game of ‘tag’ by calling me a racist. Another common idea of what constitutes a ‘racist’ is someone who scapegoats other races for their problems. Nah, that’s not me. I blame my parents and, increasingly, myself. So by that definition, I am not a racist.

Imagine you have the power to change and shape reality and you have thousands of years of magical knowledge at your fingertips because of the internet. But right at the time when humanity leans dangerously close to the brink of extinction, you use all that to… put pentagrams on knee-high socks? It feels weird, right? I don’t think the commodification of witchcraft is entirely witches’ fault. Capitalism is really good at neutralizing a threat through commodifying it. Put a price tag on something and you can own and control it. Finding your inner power is so important, especially for women, girls, queer people, and people of color, who are told so often to shrink themselves for others. Witchcraft is a tool for accessing that inner power, and it gets me so mad to see all this potential energy directed at purely surface-level aesthetic stuff. Are women really going to have our power reduced down to image once again?

There are videos and books in her room to entertain her, but Miracolina has to laugh, because just as the harvest camp van had only happy, family-friendly movies, the titles she has to choose from here have a clear agenda as well. They’re all about kids being mistreated, but rising above it, or kids empowering themselves in a world that doesn’t understand them. Everything from Dickens to Salinger—as if Miracolina Roselli could possibly have anything in common with Holden Caulfield. ... Finally a bald middle-aged man comes in with a clipboard and a name tag that just says BOB. “I used to be a respected psychiatrist until I spoke out against unwinding,” Bob tells her after the obligatory introductions. “Being ostracized was a blessing in disguise, though, because it allowed me to come here, where I’m truly needed.” Miracolina keeps her arms folded, giving him nothing. She knows what this is all about. They call it “deprogramming,” which is a polite term for undoing brainwashing with more brainwashing.

products.” The Global Positioning System (GPS) uses spread spectrum. So does the U.S. military’s $41 billion MILSATCOM satellite communications network. Wireless local area networks (wLANs) use spread spectrum, as do wireless cash registers, bar-code readers, restaurant menu pads, and home control systems. So does Qualcomm’s Omni-TRACS mobile information system for commercial trucking fleets. So do unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), electronic automotive subsystems, aerial and maritime mobile broadband, wireless access points, digital watermarking, and much more. A study done for Microsoft in 2009 estimated the minimum economic value of spread-spectrum Wi-Fi in homes and hospitals and RFID tags in clothing retail outlets in the U.S. as $16–$37 billion per year. These uses, the study notes, “only account for 15% of the total projected market for unlicensed [spectrum] chipsets in 2014, and therefore significantly underestimates the total value being generated in unlicensed usage over this time period.” A market of which 15 percent is $25 billion would be a $166 billion market.

Take the common Buddhist practice of “noting,” for example: practitioners learn to label their worries and feelings with a simple tag like “thinking” or “anger,” taking note of them mindfully without engaging them directly. In a 2007 study, the UCLA psychologist Matthew Lieberman showed thirty volunteers fear-provoking images and then asked them to note their feelings (“I feel afraid”) as he monitored their brain activity. Upon seeing the unpleasant images, the subjects’ amygdalae lit up at first, but the labeling process soon sparked activity in the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, damping activity in the amygdala. Lieberman believes this mindful noting—the simple act of putting our feelings into words—helps the brain disambiguate our emotions and provide a level of detachment from them. “One of the ways labeling is useful is in talking with other people,” he told me. “If you can get someone to talk about their feelings, it’ll end up being beneficial to them in ways they may not realize.” (Writing about how we feel in a journal serves the same purpose; it helps us sort out emotions, like anxiety, on a deeper subconscious level.)

They also devised an ingeniously low-tech solution to a complex problem. Even highly verbal autistic adults occasionally struggle with processing and producing speech, particularly in the chaotic and generally overwhelming atmosphere of a conference. By providing attendees with name-tag holders and pieces of paper that were red on one side and yellow on the other, they enabled Autistics to communicate their needs and desires without having to articulate them in the pressure of the moment. The red side facing out signified, "Nobody should try to interact with me," while the yellow side meant, "Only people I already know should interact with me, not strangers." (Green badges were added later to signify, "I want to interact but am having trouble initiating, so please initiate an interaction with me.") These color-coded "interaction signal badges" turned out to be so useful that they have since been widely adopted at autistic-run events all over the world, and name-tag labels similar to Autreat ("autistic retreat") green badges have recently been employed at conferences for Perl programmers to indicate that the wearer is open to spontaneous social approaches.

Did It Ever Occur to You That Maybe You’re Falling in Love? BY AILISH HOPPER We buried the problem. We planted a tree over the problem. We regretted our actions toward the problem. We declined to comment on the problem. We carved a memorial to the problem, dedicated it. Forgot our handkerchief. We removed all “unnatural” ingredients, handcrafted a locally-grown tincture for the problem. But nobody bought it. We freshly-laundered, bleached, deodorized the problem. We built a wall around the problem, tagged it with pictures of children, birds in trees. We renamed the problem, and denounced those who used the old name. We wrote a law for the problem, but it died in committee. We drove the problem out with loud noises from homemade instruments. We marched, leafleted, sang hymns, linked arms with the problem, got dragged to jail, got spat on by the problem and let out. We elected an official who Finally Gets the problem. … We watched carefully for the problem, but our flashlight died. We had dreams of the problem. In which we could no longer recognize ourselves. We reformed. We transformed. Turned over a new leaf. Turned a corner, found ourselves near a scent that somehow reminded us of the problem, In ways we could never Put into words. That Little I-can’t-explain-it That makes it hard to think. That Rings like a siren inside.

In January 2004 President George W. Bush put NASA in high gear, heading back to the moon with a space vision that was to have set in motion future exploration of Mars and other destinations. The Bush space policy focused on U.S. astronauts first returning to the moon as early as 2015 and no later than 2020. Portraying the moon as home to abundant resources, President Bush did underscore the availability of raw materials that might be harvested and processed into rocket fuel or breathable air. “We can use our time on the moon to develop and test new approaches and technologies and systems that will allow us to function in other, more challenging, environments. The moon is a logical step toward further progress and achievement,” he remarked in rolling out his space policy. To fulfill the Bush space agenda required expensive new rockets—the Ares I launcher and the large, unfunded Ares V booster—plus a new lunar module, all elements of the so-called Constellation Program. The Bush plan forced retirement of the space shuttle in 2010 to pay for the return to the moon, but there were other ramifications as well. Putting the shuttle out to pasture created a large human spaceflight gap in reaching the International Space Station. The price tag for building the station is roughly $100 billion, and without the space shuttle, there’s no way to reach it without Russian assistance. In the end, the stars of the Constellation Program were out of financial alignment. It was an impossible policy to implement given limited NASA money.

Starting a little over a decade ago, Target began building a vast data warehouse that assigned every shopper an identification code—known internally as the “Guest ID number”—that kept tabs on how each person shopped. When a customer used a Target-issued credit card, handed over a frequent-buyer tag at the register, redeemed a coupon that was mailed to their house, filled out a survey, mailed in a refund, phoned the customer help line, opened an email from Target, visited Target.com, or purchased anything online, the company’s computers took note. A record of each purchase was linked to that shopper’s Guest ID number along with information on everything else they’d ever bought. Also linked to that Guest ID number was demographic information that Target collected or purchased from other firms, including the shopper’s age, whether they were married and had kids, which part of town they lived in, how long it took them to drive to the store, an estimate of how much money they earned, if they’d moved recently, which websites they visited, the credit cards they carried in their wallet, and their home and mobile phone numbers. Target can purchase data that indicates a shopper’s ethnicity, their job history, what magazines they read, if they have ever declared bankruptcy, the year they bought (or lost) their house, where they went to college or graduate school, and whether they prefer certain brands of coffee, toilet paper, cereal, or applesauce. There are data peddlers such as InfiniGraph that “listen” to shoppers’ online conversations on message boards and Internet forums, and track which products people mention favorably. A firm named Rapleaf sells information on shoppers’ political leanings, reading habits, charitable giving, the number of cars they own, and whether they prefer religious news or deals on cigarettes. Other companies analyze photos that consumers post online, cataloging if they are obese or skinny, short or tall, hairy or bald, and what kinds of products they might want to buy as a result.

One day Marlboro Man invited my sister, Betsy, and me to the ranch to work cattle. She was home from college and bored, and Marlboro Man wanted Tim to meet another member of my family. “Working cattle” is the term used to describe the process of pushing cattle, one by one, through a working chute, during which time they are branded, dehorned, ear tagged, and “doctored” (temperature taken, injections given). The idea is to get all the trauma and mess over with in one fell swoop so the animals can spend their days grazing peacefully in the pasture. When Betsy and I pulled up and parked, Tim greeted us at the chute and immediately assigned us our duties. He handed my sister a hot shot, which is used to gently zap the animal’s behind to get it to move through the chute. It’s considered the easy job. “You’ll be pushing ’em through,” Tim told Betsy. She dutifully took the hot shot, studying the oddly shaped object in her hands. Next, Tim handed me an eight-inch-long, thick-gauge probe with some kind of electronic device attached. “You’ll be taking their temperature,” Tim informed me. Easy enough, I thought. But how does this thing fit into its ear? Or does it slide under its arm somehow? Perhaps I insert it under the tongue? Will the cows be okay with this? Tim showed me to my location--at the hind end of the chute. “You just wait till the steer gets locked in the chute,” Tim directed. “Then you push the stick all the way in and wait till I tell you to take it out.” Come again? The bottom fell out of my stomach as my sister shot me a worried look, and I suddenly wished I’d eaten something before we came. I felt weak. I didn’t dare question the brother of the man who made my heart go pitter-pat, but…in the bottom? Up the bottom? Seriously? Before I knew it, the first animal had entered the chute. Various cowboys were at different positions around the animal and began carrying out their respective duties. Tim looked at me and yelled, “Stick it in!” With utter trepidation, I slid the wand deep into the steer’s rectum. This wasn’t natural. This wasn’t normal. At least it wasn’t for me. This was definitely against God’s plan.

When you have an honest heart, you do not get engaged nor get involved with any smear campaigns nor black propaganda! When you have an honest heart, you do not malign nor take advantage of generous people who helped and trusted you! When you have an honest heart, you do not shit on people whom you used and abused for three years! Do not fall into a political naïvety and become a victim or a doormat nor have your generosity and honest heart be used and abused by unscrupulous political movers, abusive, aggressive political harridans who scam gullible generous hearts by asking donations, funds, services, foods, urgent favours, and after using you and abusing your generosity, trust, and kindness; whereby these unscrupulous and deceptive political movers, abusive, aggressive political harridans intentionally and maliciously create forged screenshots of evidence convincing their audience or political groups that you are a mentally ill person, a brain-damaged person as they even brand you as "Sisang Baliw," or crazy Sisa, a threat, a risk, a danger, they maliciously and destructively red-tag your friends as communists, and they resort to calumny, libel and slander against you, to shame you, defame you, discredit you, blame you, hurt you, make you suffer for having known the truth of their deceptive global Operandi, and for something you didn’t do through their mob lynching, calumny, polemics mongering, forgery, and cyberbullying efforts. Their character assassination through libel and slander aims to ruin your integrity, persona, trustworthiness, and credibility with their destructive fabricated calumny, lies, identity theft, forged screenshots of polemics mongering, and framing up. Amidst all their forgery, fraud, libel and slander they committed: you have a right to defy and stop their habitual abuse without breaking the law and fight for your rights against any forms of aggression, public lynching, bullies, threats, blackmail, and their repetitive maltreatment or abuse, identity theft, forgery, deceptions fraud, scams, cyber libel, libel, and slander. When you defend human rights, you fight against corruption and injustice, help end impunity: be sure that you are not part of any misinformation, disinformation, smear campaigns and black propaganda. Do not serve, finance, or cater directly or indirectly for those dirty politicians. Those who are engaged in abusively dishonest ways do not serve to justify their end. Deceiving and scamming other people shall always be your lifetime self-inflicted karmic loss. Be a law-abiding citizen. Be respectful. Be honest. Be factual. Be truthful. You can be an effective human rights defender when you have clean and pure intentions, lawful and morally upright, and have an honest heart." ~ Angelica Hopes, an excerpt from Calunniatopia Book 1, Stronzata Trilogy Genre: inspirational, political, literary novel © 2021 Ana Angelica Abaya van Doorn

The opponent seemed to shift slightly in the seat. His index finger tapped a card, just a couple strokes. There it was the card that ruined his hand. Her hazel eyes release the player across from her to steal a glance registering the emotion of observers around the table then to her best friend. Sophie looks like a Nervous Nelly-she, always worries. She knows the girl will put too much emphasis on a lost hand. The striking man with his lusty brown eyes tries to draw Sophie closer. Now that he has folded and left the game, he is unnecessary, and the seasoned flirt easily escapes his reach. He leaves with a scowl; Sophie turns and issues knowing wink. Ell’s focus is now unfettered, freeing her again to bring down the last player. When she wins this hand, she will smile sweetly, thank the boys for their indulgence, and walk away $700 ahead. The men never suspected her; she’s no high roller. She realizes she and Sophie will have to stay just a bit. Mill around and pay homage to the boy’s egos. The real trick will be leaving this joint alone without one of them trying to tag along. Her opponent is taking his time; he is still undecided as to what card to keep—tap, tap. He may not know, but she has an idea which one he will choose. He attempts to appear nonchalant, but she knows she has him cornered. She makes a quick glance for Mr. Lusty Brown-eyes; he has found a new dame who is much more receptive than Sophie had been. Good, that small problem resolved itself for them. She returns her focuses on the cards once more and notes, her opponent’s eyes have dilated a bit. She has him, but she cannot let the gathering of onlookers know. She wants them to believe this was just a lucky night for a pretty girl. Her mirth finds her eyes as she accepts his bid. From a back table, there is a ruckus indicating the crowd’s appreciation of a well-played game as it ends. Reggie knew a table was freeing up, and just in time, he did not want to waste this evening on the painted and perfumed blonde dish vying for his attention. He glances the way of the table that slowly broke up. He recognizes most of the players and searches out the winner amongst them. He likes to take on the victor, and through the crowd, he catches a glimpse of his goal, surprised that he had not noticed her before. The women who frequent the back poker rooms in speakeasies all dress to compete – loud colors, low bodices, jewelry which flashes in the low light. This dame faded into the backdrop nicely, wearing a deep gray understated yet flirty gown. The minx deliberately blended into the room filled with dark men’s suits. He chuckles, thinking she is just as unassuming as can be playing the room as she just played those patsies at the table. He bet she had sat down all wide-eyed with some story about how she always wanted to play cards. He imagined she offered up a stake that wouldn’t be large but at the same time, substantial enough. Gauging her demeanor, she would have been bold enough to have the money tucked in her bodice. Those boys would be eager after she teased them by retrieving her stake. He smiled a slow smile; he would not mind watching that himself. He knew gamblers; this one was careful not to call in the hard players, just a couple of marks, which would keep the pit bosses off her. He wants to play her; however, before he can reach his goal, the skirt slips away again, using her gray camouflage to aid her. Hell, it is just as well, Reggie considered she would only serve as a distraction and what he really needs is the mental challenge of the game not the hot release of some dame–good or not. Off in a corner, the pit boss takes out a worn notepad, his meaty hands deftly use a stub of a pencil to enter the notation. The date and short description of the two broads quickly jotted down for his boss Mr. Deluca. He has seen the pair before, and they are winning too often for it to be accidental or to be healthy.

Endometriosis, or painful periods? (Endometriosis is when pieces of the uterine lining grow outside of the uterine cavity, such as on the ovaries or bowel, and cause painful periods.) Mood swings, PMS, depression, or just irritability? Weepiness, sometimes over the most ridiculous things? Mini breakdowns? Anxiety? Migraines or other headaches? Insomnia? Brain fog? A red flush on your face (or a diagnosis of rosacea)? Gallbladder problems (or removal)? — PART E — Poor memory (you walk into a room to do something, then wonder what it was, or draw a blank midsentence)? Emotional fragility, especially compared with how you felt ten years ago? Depression, perhaps with anxiety or lethargy (or, more commonly, dysthymia: low-grade depression that lasts more than two weeks)? Wrinkles (your favorite skin cream no longer works miracles)? Night sweats or hot flashes? Trouble sleeping, waking up in the middle of the night? A leaky or overactive bladder? Bladder infections? Droopy breasts, or breasts lessening in volume? Sun damage more obvious, even glaring, on your chest, face, and shoulders? Achy joints (you feel positively geriatric at times)? Recent injuries, particularly to wrists, shoulders, lower back, or knees? Loss of interest in exercise? Bone loss? Vaginal dryness, irritation, or loss of feeling (as if there were layers of blankets between you and the now-elusive toe-curling orgasm)? Lack of juiciness elsewhere (dry eyes, dry skin, dry clitoris)? Low libido (it’s been dwindling for a while, and now you realize it’s half or less than what it used to be)? Painful sex? — PART F — Excess hair on your face, chest, or arms? Acne? Greasy skin and/or hair? Thinning head hair (which makes you question the justice of it all if you’re also experiencing excess hair growth elsewhere)? Discoloration of your armpits (darker and thicker than your normal skin)? Skin tags, especially on your neck and upper torso? (Skin tags are small, flesh-colored growths on the skin surface, usually a few millimeters in size, and smooth. They are usually noncancerous and develop from friction, such as around bra straps. They do not change or grow over time.) Hyperglycemia or hypoglycemia and/or unstable blood sugar? Reactivity and/or irritability, or excessively aggressive or authoritarian episodes (also known as ’roid rage)? Depression? Anxiety? Menstrual cycles occurring more than every thirty-five days? Ovarian cysts? Midcycle pain? Infertility? Or subfertility? Polycystic ovary syndrome? — PART G — Hair loss, including of the outer third of your eyebrows and/or eyelashes? Dry skin? Dry, strawlike hair that tangles easily? Thin, brittle fingernails? Fluid retention or swollen ankles? An additional few pounds, or 20, that you just can’t lose? High cholesterol? Bowel movements less often than once a day, or you feel you don’t completely evacuate? Recurrent headaches? Decreased sweating? Muscle or joint aches or poor muscle tone (you became an old lady overnight)? Tingling in your hands or feet? Cold hands and feet? Cold intolerance? Heat intolerance? A sensitivity to cold (you shiver more easily than others and are always wearing layers)? Slow speech, perhaps with a hoarse or halting voice? A slow heart rate, or bradycardia (fewer than 60 beats per minute, and not because you’re an elite athlete)? Lethargy (you feel like you’re moving through molasses)? Fatigue, particularly in the morning? Slow brain, slow thoughts? Difficulty concentrating? Sluggish reflexes, diminished reaction time, even a bit of apathy? Low sex drive, and you’re not sure why? Depression or moodiness (the world is not as rosy as it used to be)? A prescription for the latest antidepressant but you’re still not feeling like yourself? Heavy periods or other menstrual problems? Infertility or miscarriage? Preterm birth? An enlarged thyroid/goiter? Difficulty swallowing? Enlarged tongue? A family history of thyroid problems?

One danger zone is dialogue ... At the moment of ultimate showing, we writers get nervous. ... We allow characters to tell us about the story, to soliloquize, to have insights into their lives that no real person could manage. We also work very hard to control the part of dialogue that is not in the character's voice - the tags. We have the characters chortle and wheeze and whisper and whine; we use adverbs to remind the reader and reassure ourselves how things are being said. A nice contrast to this tendency is the following conversation, form Ernest Hemingway's story 'The Sea Change': 'No thanks,' he said. 'It doesn't do any good to say I'm sorry.' 'No.' 'Nor to tell you how it is?' 'I'd rather not hear.' 'I love you very much.' 'Yes, this proves it.' 'I'm sorry,' she said, 'if you don't understand.' 'I understand. That's the trouble. I understand.' How different our experience would be if the storytelling were more anxious: 'No thanks,' he said bitterly, the words sharp in his mouth. 'It doesn't do any good to say I'm sorry?' she poignantly wondered. 'No.' Phil touched her hand with his, then drew it away. He ground his teeth. 'Nor to tell you how it is?' she Sapphically queried. 'I'd rather not hear,' he groused. 'I love you very much,' she said, perhaps ingenuously. (Peter Rock)

The Lowly Thermostat, Now Minter of Megawatts How Nest is turning its consumer hit into a service for utilities. Peter Fairley | 945 words • Google’s $3.2 billion acquisition of Nest Labs in January put the Internet of things on the map. Everyone had vaguely understood that connecting everyday objects to the Internet could be a big deal. Here was an eye-popping price tag to prove it. Nest, founded by former Apple engineers in 2010, had managed to turn the humble thermostat into a slick, Internet-connected gadget. By this year, Nest was selling 100,000 of them a month, according to an estimate by Morgan Stanley. At $249 a pop, that’s a nice business. But more interesting is what Nest has been up to since last May in Texas, where an Austin utility is paying Nest to remotely turn down people’s air conditioners in order to conserve power on hot summer days—just when electricity is most expensive. For utilities, this kind of “demand response” has long been seen as a killer app for a smart electrical grid, because if electricity use can be lowered just enough at peak times, utilities can avoid firing up costly (and dirty) backup plants. Demand response is a neat trick. The Nest thermostat manages it by combining two things that are typically separate—price information and control over demand. It’s consumers who control the air conditioners, electric heaters, and furnaces that dominate a home’s energy diet. But the actual cost of energy can vary widely, in ways that consumers only dimly appreciate and can’t influence. While utilities frequently carry out demand

Once the icon appears, you can then easily start using it by logging in to your Evernote account on web clipper. Then every time you see some content on the internet that you’d like to save, simply click on the Web Clipper tab and it will give you a number of options to save it in the right notebooks and by tagging them appropriately. The Web Clipper also gives you the option to either save the whole page, just the URL or just the image or all of it. So you can

Each day, Internet users share more than 1.8 billion photos, according to a report by venture firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. For advertisers, the social media posts that include those photos are more valuable than those with just text because pictures reveal how consumers act "in the wild." "You have a window into their world," said Duncan Alney, CEO of Firebelly Marketing in Indianapolis, which uses Ditto Labs' service. Alney, whose firm represents a beer company, learned from Ditto that people drink beer not just with pub grub but also with healthier snacks like hummus. And that consumers who favor mainstream beers also consume craft brews. Other companies use it to interact with fans. Nissan North America found a photo on Twitter of a baby peeking out from behind a cardboard cutout of a Nissan race car driver. Nissan got the Twitter user's permission and reposted the photo on the company's account, garnering 17 retweets and 37 favorites. The original photo was not tagged with "Nissan," so without Ditto the company never would have found it, said Rob Robinson, a senior specialist in social communications at the automaker.

One way to limit these is to create a filter in your mail client to search your mail and identify all messages that contain the word “unsubscribe.” If you’re using Gmail, you can create a tag for these messages (ex. “optional”) in order to easily identify mailing lists you don’t need, so you can unsubscribe.

Two primary points of abuse are the use of the meta fields in websites and extraneous links. Meta fields were originally designed to provide a way for site operators to add some keywords to their sites that did not need to be displayed to users, but might be useful to search engines. A site might use meta fields to give some synonyms for their content or to elaborate ideas that might be taken for granted by readers. For example, a website mentioning Brooklyn many times, but not New York City, might decide to add New York as a meta tag. However, some site operators put words in meta fields that have nothing to do with their content (the most common such word being sex since a great many Internet searches are from people looking for pornography).

Section One Summary Here’s what you should take away from this section about on-page optimization:         On-page optimization is what you do on your website to influence SERPs on Google.         Doing proper keyword research is the first step to a successful SEO campaign.         Having proper meta tags is essential. Always include your keyword phrase(s) in your meta tags.         The proper meta tags include your title tag, description tag, keywords tag, and robots tag.         Choose your URL carefully. Your URL doesn’t have to have your keyword included but it helps when other sites link to your site. Avoid exact match domains.         How you format your page is important for optimization purposes.         Make sure you design your web pages so Google is forced to read your on-page content first.         Verify that your code is W3C compliant.         Don’t forget to include your keyword phrase(s) in , , and header tags. This signifies the importance of your content to Google.         Label each graphic with an alt tag that includes your keyword phrase.         Place your keyword(s) in the first twenty-five words on your web page and the last twenty-five words on your web page.         Eliminate Flash if it’s the main presentation of your website. Google does not view this favorably.         If you’re going to use JavaScript to enhance the overall visitor experience of your website, place the code in an external file.         Include a sitemap that’s easily accessible by Google. Submit an XML version of your sitemap through Google Webmaster Tools.          Never underestimate the power of internal linking. A good internal linking structure can improve your SERPs.          Keyword development is one of the most important on-page optimization strategies.          Research keywords and competing websites to select ideal keywords.          Research the strength of competing websites before selecting your final keywords using Google PR and authority (ex: number of inbound links).          Page load speed is a significant factor in Google rankings. Ensure that your home page loads more quickly than those of competing

Janet seldom used the things she bought. Her home was full of clothes with the tags still attached. As with other of our clients, many things never left the original box or packing material. For those who suffer from compulsive buying but not hoarding, the purchased items are frequently returned, sold, or given away. For people who hoard, boxes pile up and gobble up living space.

In the search for a new superintendent, the Massachusetts Association of School Committees gave the lowest price for a search service. The $12,000 price tag includes resume screening, focus group discussions and interviews to help the district sort through applicants. Another $8,000 could be used for ads that district policy dictates should be run in the Boston Globe and The Sun.

Increasingly, product developers roll out what’s known as a minimum viable product (MVP).6 An MVP accomplishes the goal of the customer—it tracks your exercise, cooks your food, or monitors your blood sugar—with services and some style, to support the higher price tag it carries. Companies that ship MVPs know that they will improve them and that ideas for those improvements will be generated from the people who first use the product. As Stefan Olander, vice president and general manager of digital sport at Nike, puts it “Get going. Then get better.”7 Software development for websites and applications is undergoing a revolution, from huge complex projects and infrequent releases to the continuous, agile development cycles happening now.

We use the :link pseudo-class to target all anchors tags which have yet to be clicked on.

And there was time enough--or so it seemed--for all the cherries atop all the ice-cream sundaes in all the world to fall from their frozen perches, as the heat of a treasure chest summer melted them away. Down and down into the cups of what it would all become, trusting on the ingredients, and how much love had been used to unite them.

You know I used to think that love was something a person fell into? Not anymore. It's an occurrence. A stupendous, spectacular incident. Something we never even realize how much we need until it's there.

I used to think that love was something a person fell into? Not anymore. It's an occurrence. A stupendous, spectacular incident. Something we never even realize how much we need until it's there.

Heading Tags or Headers The language used to build a web page is known as HTML.  It’s a markup language that tells a website browser how a web page should be displayed.  Head tags or “heading tags” are used to create headlines or bold sub-headers on a page.  Just like in a newspaper, headlines denote importance on a topic.  They may be all someone reads as they skim the page, so Google puts special emphasis on the H1-H6 tags used to create these headings.  You will want your keywords to appear in these headers in a logical, natural way to boost the on-page optimization of your site’s pages.

In the late 1990s, Parachute was the market leader with more than 50 per cent market share. Fresh from its success in taking market share in toothpaste away from Colgate using Pepsodent, HUL entered the coconut oil category to take on Marico. Dadiseth, the then chairman of HUL, had warned Mariwala to sell Marico to HUL or face dire consequences. Mariwala decided to take on the challenge. Even the capital markets believed that Marico stood no chance against the might of HUL which resulted in Marico’s price-to-earnings ratio dipping to as low as 7x, as against 13x during its listing in 1996. As part of its plans to take on Marico, HUL relaunched Nihar in 1998, acquired Cococare from Redcon and positioned both brands as price challengers to Parachute. In addition, HUL also increased advertising and promotion spends for its brands. In one quarter in FY2000, HUL’s advertising and promotional (A&P) spend on coconut oil alone was an amount which was almost equivalent to Marico’s full year A&P budget (around Rs 30 crore). As Milind Sarwate, former CFO of Marico, recalls, ‘Marico’s response was typically entrepreneurial and desi. We quickly realized that we have our key resource engine under threat. So, we re-prioritized and focused entirely on Parachute. We gave the project a war flavour. For example, the business conference on this issue saw Mariconians dressed as soldiers. The project was called operation Parachute ki Kasam. The leadership galvanized the whole team. It was exhilarating as the team realized the gravity of the situation and sprang into action. We were able to recover lost ground and turn the tables, so much so that eventually Marico acquired the aggressor brand, Nihar.’ Marico retaliated by relaunching Parachute: (a) with a new packaging; (b) with a new tag line highlighting its purity (Shuddhata ki Seal—or the seal of purity); (c) by widening its distribution; and (d) by launching an internal sales force initiative. Within twelve months, Parachute regained its lost share, thus limiting HUL’s growth. Despite several relaunches, Nihar failed against Parachute. Eventually, HUL dropped the brand Nihar off its power brand list before selling it off to Marico in 2006. Since then, Parachute has been the undisputed leader in the coconut oil category. This leadership has ensured that when one visits the hair oil section in a retail store, about 80 per cent of the shelves are occupied by Marico-branded hair oil.

What made a movie buff different from others was the amount of freakish details they chose to fill their heads with. The typical movie-goer remembered the big lines, the ones that you could find on the film’s shirts and posters. Just a bunch of tag-lines used for promotion. A true movie buff memorized the odd ones that said more about the story’s theme or characters. A true buff read up on the movie’s history.

Honey, you can’t call dibs on a human being.” Her tone rose high enough to shatter glass. “Like calling something mine makes it so, because if it did, I’d be driving around town in a Porsche instead of Granddaddy’s broken down Ford. Ain’t nothing here that was yours.” Using the tray, she backed him against the office door. “Anything you left behind is at the DAV thrift store. They put a price tag on things, and let me tell you, yours wasn’t worth much.

The first eye-opener came in the 1970s, when DARPA, the Pentagon’s research arm, organized the first large-scale speech recognition project. To everyone’s surprise, a simple sequential learner of the type Chomsky derided handily beat a sophisticated knowledge-based system. Learners like it are now used in just about every speech recognizer, including Siri. Fred Jelinek, head of the speech group at IBM, famously quipped that “every time I fire a linguist, the recognizer’s performance goes up.” Stuck in the knowledge-engineering mire, computational linguistics had a near-death experience in the late 1980s. Since then, learning-based methods have swept the field, to the point where it’s hard to find a paper devoid of learning in a computational linguistics conference. Statistical parsers analyze language with accuracy close to that of humans, where hand-coded ones lagged far behind. Machine translation, spelling correction, part-of-speech tagging, word sense disambiguation, question answering, dialogue, summarization: the best systems in these areas all use learning. Watson, the Jeopardy! computer champion, would not have been possible without it.

Since Paul wasn’t a big conversationalist—he was the anti-Mac, in other words, and today had been the longest she’d ever heard him speak in consecutive sentences—Jena watched the scenery for a while. Then she decided to study the inside of Paul’s truck to see what she could learn about him. Technically, it was exactly like hers and Gentry’s. It had a black exterior with a blue light bar across the top and the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries Enforcement Division logo on the doors. It was tech heavy on the front dash, just like theirs, with LDWF, Terrebonne Parish Sheriff’s Office, and Louisiana State Police Troop C radios, a laptop, a GPS unit, and a weather unit. In her truck and in Gentry’s, the cords and wires were a colorful tangle of plastic and metal, usually with extra plugs dangling around like vines. Paul’s cords were all black, and he had them woven in pairs and tucked underneath the dash, where they neatly disappeared. She leaned over to see how he’d achieved such a thing, and noticed identical zip ties holding them in place. “Sinclair, I hate to ask, but what are you doing?” He sounded more bemused than annoyed, so she said, “I’m psychoanalyzing you based on the interior of your truck.” He almost ran off the road. “Why?” “Your scintillating conversation was putting me to sleep.” His dark brows knit together but he seemed to have no answer to that. She turned around in her seat, as much as the seat belt allowed, and continued her study. Paul had a 12-gauge shotgun and a .223 carbine mounted right behind the driver’s seat, same as in her own truck. The mounts had hidden release buttons so the agents could get the guns out one-handed and quickly. But where her truck had a catch-all supply of stuff, from paper towels to zip ties to evidence bags to fast-food wrappers thrown in the back, Paul’s backseat was empty but for a zippered storage container normal people used for shoes. Each space held different things, all neatly arranged. Jena spotted evidence bags in one. Zip ties in another. Notebooks. Citation books. Paperwork. A spare uniform hung over one window, with a dry-cleaner’s tag dangling from the shirt’s top button. Good Lord. She turned back around. “What did you learn?” Paul finally asked. “You’re an obsessive-compulsive neat freak,” she said. “Accent on freak.

Below are steps on how to build free and quality backlinks: Search niche-related forums and answer questions and concerns with useful information. On your signature, include a link to your website. It is important to just put a link on the signature and not on the post so you will not be tagged as a spammer. Article directories such as Ezinearticles ranks high in Google. Submit niche-related articles to them. On the author’s bio or resource page, add the website link. Create press releases and submit them to popular press release websites such as PRNewswire. Create related content and post it in YouTube (as discussed in Chapter 6). A lot of people watch videos about things they want to know on YouTube. This popular video site has millions of visitors each day. Take advantage of its traffic. Under your video, lead them to your website through a link.

Like any normal woman, I would see a dress, buy it, rip the tags off with my teeth, save the buttons for ten to twelve years in a drawer, and wear it to work. If I was going on a date, I might take a little extra care and use nail clippers to remove the tag, wear a cardigan on top, and cinch the whole look together with a wide belt.

there now sat a square package perhaps a cubit on a side, done up in a golden wrapping all spattered with ornamental sparks of brighter and darker gold. She went over to it, picked it up to test the weight: somewhat heavy. Arrhae shook the box, then smiled at herself. Nothing rattled. She wandered back into her chamber with it, pushed her clothes aside, and sat down on the couch. Carefully Arrhae unwrapped the paper without tearing it—the old habit of a household manager, not to waste anything that might be useful later—and set it aside, revealing a plain golden paperboard box inside. A seal held the closing-flap down. She slit the seal with one thumbnail, opened the box, and found inside it some white tissue spangled with more golden spots, all wrapped around something roughly spherical. Arrhae pushed the padding-tissue aside to reveal a smooth clear substance, a glassy dome. Reaching into the box, she brought out what revealed itself as a dish garden of clear glass: the bottom of it full of stripes of colored sand, and rooted in the sand, various small dry-climate plants, spiny or thick-leaved, one or two of them producing tiny, delicate, golden flowers. Attached to the upper dome, instead of a chip or tag, was a small, white, gold-edged printed card that said, FROM AN ADMIRER—WELCOME HOME. Arrhae

Another contender was Nokia’s 9000 Communicator, a book-sized tool that looked like a cellphone strapped onto a mini keyboard. A precursor to the smartphone, the 9000 combined computing, cellular, and Internet applications such as browsing and e-mail. The Finnish phone was so glamorous it was used by Val Kilmer’s Simon Templar character in the 1997 remake of The Saint. Few consumers, however, could afford the $800 price tag, and wireless cellular network carriers more accustomed to handling voice traffic charged a fortune to relay

with or using old secondhand books the teachers had. The one from Potions had been the worst, with pages falling out, and someone had scribbled and crossed things out on almost every page. I hoped now I might actually start to learn some magic. During dinner, I kept looking over at Hermione. I caught her eye a few times, but she'd look away. When I got up to leave, she got up too. I had a feeling she was following me. I tried to walk quickly. "Austin," she yelled. "Wait up." I kept walking. "Austin." I walked faster. I didn't hear the exact spell she used, but a second later, something smacked into my back, and I started walking super slow, like in those nightmares where you can't run. "What the—" I said as she caught up with me. "Sorry." She glanced down at my legs. "I could tell you weren't going to stop." "So you... you what? Hexed me?" "Hardly." She tossed a mop of hair out of her face. "It's a children's spell, used for playing tag—magic tag, that is. It should wear off anytime." Sure enough, though my legs felt like lead, I was able to walk at a normal pace. "Whatever." "Where are you heading?" "Professor Flichwick’s for extra work." "Good. I’m heading to the second floor too." "Great." I tried to sound irritated. Really, I was glad

In addition to the exterior packaging, don’t forget the items that go inside of the package, such as hang tags, free stickers, posters, postcards and other freebies. You can get stickers printed for a low cost at 123stickers.com. For postcards and any other printing, we recommend NextDayFlyers.com. You can also make hang tags yourself by printing them as business card and punching ⅛” holes into them (then attach them to your products using a tagging gun). Use your creativity to come up with additional affordable packaging ideas.

Search Engine Optimization is basically the process of enhancing the quantity and quality of site traffic to a particular site or a web site from search engines. SEO focuses on paid rather than organic traffic, and unpaid visitors rather than paid advertising or sponsored links. SEO helps increase the visibility of a site by making sure that its contents are relevant and informative. Several things can affect search engine rankings, including keyword relevancy, backlinking, title tags, meta tags, and description tags. It is important that your content is keyword-rich and that it contains keywords that are commonly used by search engine crawlers. This ensures that when a search engine user performs a search on a particular topic, they find what they are looking for. Keyword-rich content gives a higher chance of appearing in search results. Search Engine Optimization also works well in promoting your website by ensuring that your keywords appear in the meta tags of the HTML code and in the description tag of every web page that you create.

Search Engine Optimization is a term that simply means optimizing your web pages for organic, or naturally, paid, traffic from search engines. To do this, major search engines will crawl through or read, various web pages to better know what the page is all about. If the page is interesting and contains important keywords, then it is likely to show up in a search. The search engines look for certain things when reading a webpage, including the title, meta tag, and even the keyword density in the HTML. Search Engine Optimization can be used to increase your traffic, ranking, and ultimately profits, with a great deal of success. There are many benefits of SEO, however. SEO can be a great way to increase your traffic, sales, page rank, and profits, especially when done right. When you implement Search Engine Optimization into your business, you are making yourself more visible to the search engines.

What Is the Importance of Social Media Marketing? In the arena of generation, the conversation has come to be simpler than ever. The international has now gotten smaller from an extensive populated land to a community of speaking people residing in an international village. People from everywhere in the globe has come nearer collectively and distances have reduced to the volume that a character is simply a click on away. In this ever-developing community of human beings a brand new concept has emerged, the concept of 6 levels of separation. The concept at the back of that is that among you and every other character within side the international is most effective a sequence not than six human beings. This emphasizes the importance of online conversation and the manner it has made the arena an entire lot smaller. This is the electricity of social media and top smm panel the tendencies in an online conversation. A going on in a single part of the arena reaches the second element in a count of seconds. Imagine if that information or going on turned into approximately you. The importance of this generation is the benefit it gives. Using this device for your benefit can provide you with a massive quantity of benefits. Social Media Marketing brings international repute for your call. -This is your price tag to worldwide degree repute. Your corporation or your call will be regarded around the globe with hundreds of thousands of fans and fans. Millions of human beings can get admission to those websites in which human beings come to talk online and specific their views. Once you step into the arena of social media advertising and marketing all of those human beings come to be your ability prospects. Your offerings are simply an unmarried seek away. Promote your enterprise or product as a severe product. -This generation gives you get admission to clearly the complete international and all its inhabitants. They are there to study and percentage whatever that you need to say. This is your danger to set up a photo for yourself that "Hey! I am right here to do enterprise" and "I am severe approximately the product or offerings that I provide". Social media advertising and marketing is almost free. If you had been to try to attain out to hundreds of thousands of human beings via the bodily way you will make loads of investments. This generation is the manner to maximum efficaciously attains out for your ability clients, now no longer most effective in phrases of price range however in phrases of time as well. Gives you comments in the form of viewer you have. -An exciting factor approximately advertising and marketing on those social websites is the extent of comments that you could expect. Using social media advertising and marketing can in reality train you approximately the folks who are or are probably interested in your product or service. This offers you a higher danger of changing your campaigns to benefit progressed results. You may also find out about the number of folks who go to your page, or a while of folks who remark or percentage your posts, or maybe their ethnicities, localities, religion, hobbies, and preferences. You train the arena approximately your product and social media advertising and marketing educates you approximately the folks who took hobby in it. You get to understand them in my view via the community of the top smm panel. Your purchaser may also have a few problems or he may also want assist or need to investigate greater approximately your product. Your presence on social media permits you to reply to him on a private degree. This in flip assures the purchaser which you are accountable and instills a feeling of trust.