The Seven Valleys Quotes

But in another city, another valley, another ghetto, another slum, another favela, another township, another intifada, another war, another birth, somebody is singing Redemption Song, as if the Singer wrote it for no other reason but for this sufferah to sing, shout, whisper, weep, bawl, and scream right here, right now.

How about that one? Is that a constellation?" I asked, pointing upward. We were down in the small valley where the truck was parked. Alex sat leaning against a rock; I was between his legs with my back against his chest, his arms around me as we stared up at the stars. "Yeah, that's the Seven Sisters, the Pleiades." He bent his head, and I caught my breath as his warm mouth nuzzled at my neck. I hadn't gotten even remotely used yet to how good it felt to be kissed by Alex. "It's so sexy how you know all of this," I said when I could speak again. "Yeah?" I heard the grin in his voice. "I know the summer constellations, too. Will that get me bonus kisses?" "I think it might, actually.

As I walked out one evening, Walking down Bristol Street, The crowds upon the pavement Were fields of harvest wheat. And down by the brimming river I heard a lover sing Under an arch of the railway: "Love has no ending. "I'll love you, dear, I'll love you Till China and Africa meet, And the river jumps over the mountain And the salmon sing in the street, "I'll love till the ocean Is folded and hung up to dry And the seven stars go squawking Like geese about the sky. "The years shall run like rabbits, For in my arms I hold The Flower of the Ages, And the first love of the world." But all the clocks in the city Began to whirr and chime: "O let not Time deceive you, You cannot conquer Time. "In the burrows of the Nightmare Where Justice naked is, Time watches from the shadow And coughs when you would kiss. "In headaches and in worry Vaguely life leaks away, And Time will have his fancy Tomorrow or today. "Into many a green valley Drifts the appalling snow; Time breaks the threaded dances And the diver's brilliant bow. "O plunge your hands in water, Plunge them in up to the wrist; Stare, stare in the basin And wonder what you've missed. "The glacier knocks in the cupboard, The desert sighs in the bed, And the crack in the teacup opens A lane to the land of the dead. "Where the beggars raffle the banknotes And the Giant is enchanting to Jack, And the Lily-white Boy is a Roarer, And Jill goes down on her back. "O look, look in the mirror, O look in your distress; Life remains a blessing Although you cannot bless. "O stand, stand at the window As the tears scald and start; You shall love your crooked neighbor With all your crooked heart." It was late, late in the evening, The lovers they were gone; The clocks had ceased their chiming, And the deep river ran on.

One of the locations that showed up most frequently in Kira’s OASIS account logs was the planet Miyazaki in Sector Twenty-Seven. It was a bizarre and beautiful world that paid tribute to the work of Hayao Miyazaki, the famous Japanese animator behind anime masterpieces like Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind and Kiki’s Delivery Service.

Of the hundreds of companies pouring resources into AI research, let’s return to the seven that have emerged as the new giants of corporate AI research—Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent.

Humans, like all mammals, are heat engines; surviving means having to continually cool off, as panting dogs do. For that, the temperature needs to be low enough for the air to act as a kind of refrigerant, drawing heat off the skin so the engine can keep pumping. At seven degrees of warming, that would become impossible for portions of the planet’s equatorial band, and especially the tropics, where humidity adds to the problem. And the effect would be fast: after a few hours, a human body would be cooked to death from both inside and out. At eleven or twelve degrees Celsius of warming, more than half the world’s population, as distributed today, would die of direct heat. Things almost certainly won’t get that hot anytime soon, though some models of unabated emissions do bring us that far eventually, over centuries. But at just five degrees, according to some calculations, whole parts of the globe would be literally unsurvivable for humans. At six, summer labor of any kind would become impossible in the lower Mississippi Valley, and everybody in the United States east of the Rockies would suffer more from heat than anyone, anywhere, in the world today. New York City would be hotter than present-day Bahrain, one of the planet’s hottest spots, and the temperature in Bahrain “would induce hyperthermia in even sleeping humans.

We have seen twenty-seven doctors in nine years. People believe doctors know everything. I used to believe this. It's a very lonely feeling when the doctors can't do anything. You're calling out for help in viscid darkness, and all you get back is an echo.

We have found that no modern prescriptions heal the human heart so fully or so well as the prescription of the Ancient Ones. "To the hills," they would say. To which we would add, "To the trees, the valleys, and the streams, as well." For there is a power in nature that man has ignored. And the result has been heartache and pain.

Of the Three Rings that the Elves had preserved unsullied no open word was ever spoken among the Wise, and few even of the Eldar knew where they were bestowed. Yet after the fall of Sauron their power was ever at work, and where they abode there mirth also dwelt and all things were unstained by the griefs of time. Therefore ere the Third Age was ended the Elves perceived that the Ring of Sapphire was with Elrond, in the fair valley of Rivendell, upon whose house the stars of heaven most brightly shone; whereas the Ring of Adamant was in the Land of Lórien where dwelt the Lady Galadriel. A queen she was of the woodland Elves, the wife of Celeborn of Doriath, yet she herself was of the Noldor and remembered the Day before days in Valinor, and she was the mightiest and fairest of all the Elves that remained in Middle-earth. But the Red Ring remained hidden until the end, and none save Elrond and Galadriel and Cirdan knew to whom it had been committed. Thus it was that in two domains the bliss and beauty of the Elves remained still undiminished while that Age endured: in Imladris; and in Lothlórien, the hidden land between Celebrant and Anduin, where the trees bore flowers of gold and no Orc or evil thing dared ever come. Yet many voices were heard among the Elves foreboding that, if Sauron should come again, then either he would find the Ruling Ring that was lost, or at the best his enemies would discover it and destroy it; but in either chance the powers of the Three must then fail and all things maintained by them must fade, and so the Elves should pass into the twilight and the Dominion of Men begin. And so indeed it has since befallen: the One and the Seven and the Nine are destroyed; and the Three have passed away, and with them the Third Age is ended, and the Tales of the Eldar in Middle-earth draw to then-close.

I have spoken of the rich years when the rainfall was plentiful. But there were dry years too, and they put a terror on the valley. The water came in a thirty-year cycle. There would be five or six wet and wonderful years when there might be nineteen to twenty-five inches of rain, and the land would shout with grass. Then would come six or seven pretty good years of twelve to sixteen inches of rain. And then the dry years would come, and sometimes there would be only seven or eight inches of rain. The land dried up and the grasses headed out miserably a few inches high and great bare scabby places appeared in the valley. The live oaks got a crusty look and the sage-brush was gray. The land cracked and the springs dried up and the cattle listlessly nibbled dry twigs. Then the farmers and the ranchers would be filled with disgust for the Salinas Valley. The cows would grow thin and sometimes starve to death. People would have to haul water in barrels to their farms just for drinking. Some families would sell out for nearly nothing and move away. And it never failed that during the dry years the people forgot about the rich years, and during the wet years they lost all memory of the dry years. It was always that way.

It is a strange time, my dear. A novel virus haunts our streets. Days feel like weeks, weeks like months. We’re blasted with new news every second— yes and then no and then yes and no, feeding our primal panic to hoard goods and leave shelves breadless, riceless. They tell us the pandemic makes all equal—the poor and very rich— then why are the poor poorer and the rich profiting? It is a strange time, my dear. Army men are marching our streets. They force us to stay inside, threaten and arrest for a walk in the park. They wage small wars against us, but this battle began long ago. The elite technocrats are crowing in their silicone valleys as corporations grow and small businesses fold with mountains of debt— the centre cannot, will not, hold! It is a strange time, my dear. Mainstream media reports the world has never been safer as they terrorise the chambers of our minds. This stress, this anxiety is killing our immunity. But we must do it all for the elderly— or so they say! When have they ever cared for our elders? When have they ever cared for our vulnerable? We go to bed dreaming of toilet paper while they dismantle the world economy. Family businesses go bust all so we can protect the people, but only the people are suffering! At the end of this, those retired will have peanuts for pensions. They are stripping us of everything whilst our eyes are fixed on our screens. And how dare we say it’s a strange time when in seven months we’ll make America great again.

We cut three telegraph wires, and fastened the free ends to the saddles of six riding-camels of the Howeitat. The astonished team struggled far into the eastern valleys with the growing weight of twanging, tangling wire and the bursting poles dragging after them. At last they could no longer move. So we cut them loose and rode laughing after the caravan.

Valley and Seven shared a giggle. Their first shared giggle in person. Heck had frozen over. There was at least one icicle.

I’ve made enough money to look after my family for seven generations. I don’t need to be here!” he screamed in Tony’s face.

O where are you going with your love-locks flowing On the west wind bellowing along this valley track?” “The downhill path is easy, come with me an it please ye, We shall escape the uphill by never turning back.” So they two went together in glowing August weather, The honey-breathing heather lay to their left and right; And dear she was to doat on, her swift feet seemed to float on The air like soft twin pigeons too sportive to alight. “Oh, what is that in heaven where grey cloud-flakes are seven, Where blackest clouds hang riven just at the rainy skirt?” “Oh, that’s a meteor sent us, a message dumb, portentous, An undeciphered solemn signal of help or hurt>” “Oh, what is that glides quickly where velvet flowers grow thickly, Their scent comes rich and sickly?” “A scaled and hooded worm.” ”Oh, what’s that in the hollow, so pale I quake to follow?” “Oh, that’s a thin dead body which waits the eternal term.” “Turn again, O my sweetest,--turn again, false and fleetest: This beaten way thou beatest, I fear is hell’s own track.” “Nay, too steep for hill mounting; nay, too late for cost counting: This downhill path is easy, but there’s no turning back.

In California, the state's huge dairy herd produces twenty-seven million tons of manure a year, the particulates and vapors from which have helped to make air quality in the argiculturally intensive San Joaquin Valley worse than it is Los Angeles.

The foraging makes me thirsty. I allow myself two rings from the water bottle (four sips). I have seven rings left (fourteen sips). The water is disappearing. I am disappearing. But fire-building is a delightful way of unbeing. At points, I am so lost in the process that I’m even pain-free.

Perhaps the forces of winged retribution. The prophet Elijah being fed to the ravens. Like Baida, I have killed my three pigeons.’ ‘Two,’ Adam said. ‘Two died instead of Vishnevetsky. One died instead of my brother. Long ago. Attar, the Persian poet, saw the destiny of souls as a flight of birds across the seven valleys of Seeking, Love, Knowledge, Independence, Unity, Stupefaction and Annihilation, before at last being lost in the divine Ocean and thenceforth happy. A charming, if sterile, conceit. Next time, the bird may escape,’ Lymond said. ‘Happy pigeon. Next time, the archer may die.

I had a grand total of one good friend at school," Seven said, and her stomach turned at the use of the word had. Poppy had been her friend. Not anymore. "That's one more than I ever had," Valley said, her cheeks bright pink... "I just wanted to be your friend but kept messing up and it made me angry.

Seven centuries ago seven white doves rose from a deep valley flying to the snow-white summit of the mountain. One of the seven men who watched the flight said, "I see a black spot on the wing of the seventh dove." Today the people in that valley tell of seven black doves who flew to the summit of the snowy mountain.

shortly I should be able to live at peace in my cottage, with all the twenty four hours of the day to myself. Forty-six I am, and never yet had a whole week of leisure. What will 'for ever' feel like, and can I use it all? Please note its address from March onwards - Clouds Hill, Moreton, Dorset - and visit it, sometime, if you still stravage the roads of England in a great car. The cottage has two rooms; one, upstairs, for music (a gramophone and records) and one downstairs for books. There is a bath, in a demi-cupboard. For food one goes a mile, to Bovington (near the Tank Corps Depot) and at sleep-time I take my great sleeping bag, embroidered MEUM, and spread it on what seems the nicest bit of floor. There is a second bag, embroidered TUUM, for guests. The cottage looks simple, outside, and does no hurt to its setting which is twenty miles of broken heath and a river valley filled with rhododendrons run wild. I think everything, inside and outside my place, approaches perfection.

Tomino’s Hell Elder sister vomits blood, younger sister’s breathing fire while sweet little Tomino just spits up the jewels. All alone does Tomino go falling into that hell, a hell of utter darkness, without even flowers. Is Tomino’s big sister the one who whips him? The purpose of the scourging hangs dark in his mind. Lashing and thrashing him, ah! But never quite shattering. One sure path to Avici, the eternal hell. Into that blackest of hells guide him now, I pray— to the golden sheep, to the nightingale. How much did he put in that leather pouch to prepare for his trek to the eternal hell? Spring is coming to the valley, to the wood, to the spiraling chasms of the blackest hell. The nightingale in her cage, the sheep aboard the wagon, and tears well up in the eyes of sweet little Tomino. Sing, o nightingale, in the vast, misty forest— he screams he only misses his little sister. His wailing desperation echoes throughout hell— a fox peony opens its golden petals. Down past the seven mountains and seven rivers of hell— the solitary journey of sweet little Tomino. If in this hell they be found, may they then come to me, please, those sharp spikes of punishment from Needle Mountain. Not just on some empty whim Is flesh pierced with blood-red pins: they serve as hellish signposts for sweet little Tomino. —translated by David Bowles June 29, 2014

I glance past Berwyn, past Sgaeyl and the venin, to my new brother and the unconscious dragon lying in the valley beyond the canyon, guarded by seven wyvern. How could he do this? Choose this after watching me stumble and fall over the last five months. How could he willingly walk the path I’ve fought like hell to leave? He’s the last person I ever would have expected to turn, and yet here we are.

Every time Tesla interacted with Detroit it received a reminder of how the once-great city had been separated from its own can-do culture. Tesla tried to lease a small office in Detroit. The costs were incredibly low compared with space in Silicon Valley, but the city’s bureaucracy made getting just a basic office an ordeal. The building’s owner wanted to see seven years of audited financials from Tesla, which was still a private company. Then the building owner wanted two years’ worth of advanced rent. Tesla had about $50 million in the bank and could have bought the building outright. “In Silicon Valley, you say you’re backed by a venture capitalist, and that’s the end of the negotiation,” Tarpenning said. “But everything was like that in Detroit. We’d get FedEx boxes, and they couldn’t even decide who should sign for the package.

It was the mist which made everything strange, spread across the land, a seven-foot-thick blanket, stretched almost uniformly over the flat bottom of the valley, and the gentle slopes leading down into it. As silent as the mist, Codrin’s army moved out of the forest. An observer high above the ground would see rows of floating heads, arranged in a matrix, the distance between them almost regular. Having helmets of many different colors, the heads offered a striking contrast to the white-gray monotony of the mist. An army of floating heads. Unaware of their weird appearance from above, the heads continued their journey down, toward Lenard’s army. To an observer on the ground, nothing could be seen until it was too late. Lenard’s sleeping soldiers woke up when the ground trembled to the rhythm of more than a thousand horses trampling everything in their way. They woke up, and they died. Some of them died while they slept. When the last cry died away, and the fog finally lifted, the surviving men surrendered. At the end of the clash, which became known as the Battle of the Mist, Codrin found that he had lost only fifteen men. Lenard had lost half of his army, his son and his life.

I have spoken of the rich years when the rainfall was plentiful. But there were dry youeras too, and they put a terror on the valley. The water came in a thirty-year cycle. There would be five or six wet and wonderful years when there might be nineteen to twenty-five inches of rain, and the land would shout with grass. Then would come six or seven pretty good years of twelve to sixten inches of rain. And then the dry yars would come, and sometimes thre would be only seven or eight inches of rain. The land dried up and the grasses headed out miserably a few inches high and great bare scabby places appeared in the valley. The live oaks got a crusty look and the sage-brush was gray. The land cracked and the springs dried up and the cattle listlessly nibbled dry twigs. Then the farmers and the ranchers would be filled with disgust for the Salinas Valley. The cows would grow thin and sometimes starve to death. People would have to haul water in barrels to their farms just for drinking. Some families would sell out for nearly nothing and move away. And it never failed that during the dry years the people forgot about the rich years, and during the wet years they lost all memory of the dry years. It was always that way.

But what set Steuben apart from his contemporaries was his schooling under Frederick the Great, Prince Henry, and a dozen other general officers. He had learned from the best soldiers in the world how to gather and assess intelligence, how to read and exploit terrain, how to plan marches, camps, battles, and entire campaigns. He gleaned more from his seventeen years in the Prussian military than most professional soldiers would in a lifetime. In the Seven Years’ War alone, he built up a record of professional education that none of his future comrades in the Continental Army—Horatio Gates, Charles Lee, the Baron Johann de Kalb, and Lafayette included—could match.

Still gasping for breath from the exertion of the chase, the colonel lifted his rifle and aimed at the closest mountain lion. The crack of the colonel’s rifle rang through the night air, echoing off the surrounding mountains. A piece of bark flew up next to the lion as the cat leapt to a different branch of the tree. Swearing in anger that he had missed the shot, the colonel took several steps closer, levered his rifle, and fired again. Once more, the lion leaped away just in time, slinking from branch to branch as her brother hissed and snarled to keep the frenzied, stupid tree-climbing dogs at bay. Serafina ran toward her brother and sister as fast as she could, her claws out and ready to fight. The colonel fired again, and then again, twigs breaking, bark exploding, the lions hissing and snarling, the sound of the repeated shots echoing across the mist-filled valley. Discouraged by the colonel’s poor accuracy, the other hunters began to position themselves to shoot the mountain lions themselves and get it over with. “My shot!” he screamed again as he moved closer. Serafina ran straight toward them, her powerful chest expanding with raging power. She was almost there. But on the colonel’s next shot, she heard the bullet thwack into her sister’s body. Serafina watched helplessly as her sister fell from the branch of the tree and tumbled through midair, her limbs flailing as she plummeted toward the rocks below.

When she was twenty three years old she met, at a christmas party, a young man from the Erewash Valley. Morel was then twenty-seven years old. He was well-set-up, erect and very smart. He had wavy, black hair that shone again, and a vigorous black beard that had never been shaved. His cheeks were ruddy, and his red moist mouth was noticeable because he laughed so often and so heartily. He had that rare thing, a rich, ringing laugh. Gertrude Coppard had watched him fascinated. He was so full of colour and animation, his voice ran so easily into comic grotesque, he was so ready and so pleasant with everybody... Walter Morel seemed melted away before her. She was to the miner that thing of mystery and fascination, a lady.

Through Evernight he back was borne on black and roaring waves that ran o'er leagues unlit and foundered shores that drowned before the Days began, until he heard on strands of pearl where ends the world the music long, where ever-foaming billows roll the yellow gold and jewels wan. He saw the Mountain silent rise where twilight lies upon the knees of Valinor, and Eldamar beheld afar beyond the seas. A wanderer escaped from night to haven white he came at last, to Elvenhome the green and fair where keen the air, where pale as glass beneath the Hill of Ilmarin a-glimmer in a valley sheer the lamplit towers of Tirion are mirrored on the Shadowmere. He tarried there from errantry, and melodies they taught to him, and sages old him marvels told, and harps of gold they brought to him. They clothed him then in elven-white, and seven lights before him sent, as through the Calacirian to hidden land forlorn he went. He came unto the timeless halls where shining fall the countless years, and endless reigns the Elder King in Ilmarin on Mountain sheer; and words unheard were spoken then of folk of Men and Elven-kin, beyond the world were visions showed forbid to those that dwell therein. A ship then new they built for him of mithril and of elven-glass with shining prow; no shaven oar nor sail she bore on silver mast: the Silmaril as lantern light and banner bright with living flame to gleam thereon by Elbereth herself was set, who thither came and wings immortal made for him, and laid on him undying doom, to sail the shoreless skies and come behind the Sun and light of Moon.

From the days of the Assyrians and the Qin, great empires were usually built through violent conquest. In 1914 too, all the major powers owed their status to successful wars. For instance, Imperial Japan became a regional power thanks to its victories over China and Russia; Germany became Europe’s top dog after its triumphs over Austria-Hungary and France; and Britain created the world’s largest and most prosperous empire through a series of splendid little wars all over the planet. Thus in 1882 Britain invaded and occupied Egypt, losing a mere fifty-seven soldiers in the decisive Battle of Tel el-Kebir. Whereas in our days occupying a Muslim country is the stuff of Western nightmares, following Tel el-Kebir the British faced little armed resistance, and for more than six decades controlled the Nile Valley and the vital Suez Canal. Other European powers emulated the British, and whenever governments in Paris, Rome or Brussels contemplated putting boots on the ground in Vietnam, Libya or Congo, their only fear was that somebody else might get there first. Even the United States owed its great-power status to military action rather than economic enterprise alone. In 1846 it invaded Mexico, and conquered California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico and parts of Colorado, Kansas, Wyoming and Oklahoma. The peace treaty also confirmed the previous US annexation of Texas. About 13,000 American soldiers died in the war, which added 2.3 million square kilometres to the “United States (more than the combined size of France, Britain, Germany, Spain and Italy). It was the bargain of the millennium.

the field, neither cut down any out of the forests; for they shall burn the weapons with fire: and they shall spoil those that spoiled them, and rob those that robbed them, saith the Lord GOD. 11 ¶ And it shall come to pass in that day, that I will give unto Gog a place there of graves in Israel, the valley of the passengers on the east of the sea: and it shall stop the noses of the passengers: and there shall they bury Gog and all his multitude: and they shall call it The valley of Hamon-gog. 12 And seven months shall the house of Israel be burying of them, that they may cleanse the land. 13 Yea, all the people of the land shall bury them; and it shall be to them a renown the day that I shall be glorified, saith the Lord GOD. 14 And they shall sever out men of continual employment, passing through the land to bury with the passengers those that remain upon the face of the earth, to cleanse it: after the end of seven months shall they search. 15 And the passengers

Scrubby evergreen bushes released a strong scent of resin and honey; forests of pine gave way to gentle south-facing vineyards disturbed only by the ululation of early summer cicadas. Sitting up tall on the seat, she craned around eagerly to see what plants thrived naturally. It was a wild and romantic place, Laurent de Fayols had written, the whole island once bought as a wedding gift to his wife by a man who had made his fortune in the silver mines of Mexico. One of three small specks in the Mediterranean known as the Golden Isles, after the oranges, lemons, and grapefruit that glowed like lamps in their citrus groves. There were few reference works in English that offered information beyond superficial facts about the island, and those she had managed to find were old. The best had been published in 1880, by a journalist called Adolphe Smith. Ellie had been struck by the loveliness of his "description of the most Southern Point of the French Riviera": 'The island is divided into seven ranges of small hills, and in the numerous valleys thus created are walks sheltered from every wind, where the umbrella pines throw their deep shade over the path and mingle their balsamic odor with the scent of the thyme, myrtle and the tamarisk.

As children we got so we could tell time by the sun pretty well, and would know by the light in the room when we opened our eyes that it was seven o'clock and time to get  up for school, and later that it was almost ten and then almost noon and almost three o'clock and time to be dismissed. School ran strictly by clocks, the old Regulators that Mr. Hamburger was always fiddling with, adding and subtracting paper clips on the pendulum to achieve perfect time, but we were sensitive to light, knowing how little was available to us as winter came on, and always knew what time it was - as anyone will who leads a regular life in a familiar place. My poor great-grandpa,when his house burned down when Grandma left the bread baking in the summer kitchen oven to go visit the Berges and they built the new one facing west instead of south: they say he was confused the rest of his life and never got straightened out even when he set up his bed in the parlor ( which faced north as his former bedroom had): he lived in a twilight world for some time and then moved in his mind to the house he'd grown up in, and in the end didn't know one day from another until he died." Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil," but there's more than one kind of of shadow, and when a man loses track, it can kill him. Not even the siren could have saved my great-grandpa. He died of misdirection.

We put him to the test that afternoon after the Kid woke up. I piled every weapon we had into the wagon and trucked the arsenal halfway across the San Simon Valley. One by one I fired off a round from each of the borrowed weapons and wrote down the order in which I had sent the reports. When I returned at midafternoon, we compared my notes to the Kid’s. Jack had not once failed to identify gun make and model, caliber, and brand of ammunition. He was even able to tell whether I had fired off a report with my right or left hand. Lord knows how he did that. I, of course, had to see it for myself. We sent Pate off to the South Pass of the Dragoons and he commenced to fire off rounds at dusk. BAM! came the first report, aborning to us from the distant mountains and then quickly disintegrating into the maw of the desert sky. “Remington forty-four,” Jack said. “Eighteen sixty-nine model.” He sat on a rock with his hands splayed over his stumpy knees and his head cocked for the next selection. POW! Jack pursed his lips. “Colt’s Lightning . . . forty-one caliber . . . iv’ry grips.” BOOM! At this report Jack chuckled. “Well, first off . . . forty-five caliber Peacemaker, seven-and-a-half-inch barrel,” he announced proudly. Then he smiled. “That ol’ dodger Pate . . . he’s a slick one, tryin’ to pull one on me.” “What do you mean?” I asked. “Along with the Colt he let go with a derringer, thirty-two caliber. Sounded like it ain’t been cleaned in a while.” I sat down next to Jack and draped my arm over his rounded shoulders. “Jack, I believe you’ve given credence to the saying that every man on this earth serves a role.” Jack gave me a look. “ ‘Serves a roll?’ Are we in the restaurant business again?

The store smells of roasted chicken and freshly ground coffee, raw meat and ripening stone fruit, the lemon detergent they use to scrub the old sheet-linoleum floors. I inhale and feel the smile form on my face. It's been so long since I've been inside any market other than Fred Meyer, which smells of plastic and the thousands of people who pass through every day. By instinct, I head for the produce section. There, the close quarters of slim Ichiban eggplant, baby bok choy, brilliant red chard, chartreuse-and-purple asparagus, sends me into paroxysms of delight. I'm glad the store is nearly empty; I'm oohing and aahing with produce lust at the colors, the smooth, shiny textures set against frilly leaves. I fondle the palm-size plums, the soft fuzz of the peaches. And the berries! It's berry season, and seven varieties spill from green cardboard containers: the ubiquitous Oregon marionberry, red raspberry, and blackberry, of course, but next to them are blueberries, loganberries, and gorgeous golden raspberries. I pluck one from a container, fat and slightly past firm, and pop it into my mouth. The sweet explosion of flavor so familiar, but like something too long forgotten. I load two pints into my basket. The asparagus has me intrigued. Maybe I could roast it with olive oil and fresh herbs, like the sprigs of rosemary and oregano poking out of the salad display, and some good sea salt. And salad. Baby greens tossed with lemon-infused olive oil and a sprinkle of vinegar. Why haven't I eaten a salad in so long? I'll choose a soft, mild French cheese from the deli case, have it for an hors d'oeuvre with a beautiful glass of sparkling Prosecco, say, then roast a tiny chunk of spring lamb that I'm sure the nice sister will cut for me, and complement it with a crusty baguette and roasted asparagus, followed by the salad. Followed by more cheese and berries for dessert. And a fruity Willamette Valley Pinot Noir to wash it all down. My idea of eating heaven, a French-influenced feast that reminds me of the way I always thought my life would be.

Casper makes mattresses and distributes them directly to consumers via their website. I was always intrigued with how Casper could be considered a tech company, raising substantial money from Silicon Valley venture capitalists and fetching tech-like valuations in the process. Could there be an industry that feels less like technology than the pile of springs and fabric you sleep on?! But indeed Casper is a tech company. The technology isn’t about the product itself, but about how they acquire customers, how they distribute the product, and ultimately how they make the customers feel throughout the whole process of buying and using the product. Because of technology, they can do it at scale with minimal investment. They use digital engagement strategies to grow incredibly fast. Just five years since their founding, they’re doing nearly $500 million in revenue with fewer than one hundred employees. By contrast, Tempur Sealy, the largest mattress company in the world, employs seven thousand people to generate $2.7 billion in revenue.

We stood there maybe five minutes. We didn’t say anything, because there was nothing to say. And then I heard one of the most beautiful sounds I have ever heard in my entire life, that whap! whap! whap!—the distinctive chop of a helicopter. Long before we could see this thing we could hear it claw its way up that two-thousand-foot wall, once again this same lone man rising into view. He moved up the valley with greater authority. With the same consummate skill he lay those skids down again. Not waiting, I hot-footed across there and dove into the back of this machine. They slammed the door and one more time the helicopter tail went up and we moved toward the precipice, crevasses gliding by beneath the skids. We crested the edge and then went screaming down that face with the blades whipping around above us, trying to grab hold of cold, heavy, dense air that would provide lift. The machine felt alive beneath us as it pulled us out of the dive, and we knew we were safe. We retrieved Makalu at Base Camp and put him back in. We got the copilot and put him back in. We got all the gear that Madan had stripped off this machine, and we put it back in. That’s when I discovered that when Madan returned to get me, he was flying the Squirrel on just seven minutes of fuel. Madan is to me the most extraordinary person in this story, because he didn’t know me at all. He didn’t know my family, and he has his own family, for whom he is the sole provider. We were separated by language, by culture, by religion, by the entire breadth of this world, but bound together by a bond of common humanity. This man will never have to wonder again whether he has a brave heart.

Spent the first six or seven years of my life letting my family down. Couldn’t hear. Didn’t know I was supposed to. Then I didn’t know what to do with the words when they came.

At this time, rumors of student drug use and sexual indiscretions at RVA…appeared to be confirmed as the number of students being suspended or expelled abruptly increased. At the peak of the crisis the school board expressed the belief that “twenty-five to thirty-five students (were) using drugs, possibly including some girls.” Based on student testimony and confiscations the board added that, “seven or eight different types of drugs, including opium, (are) apparently being used.” Added up, this number meant that anywhere from ten to twenty percent of the High School students were experimenting extensively with drugs – a shocking figure at any school, let alone this isolated and seemingly pristine missionary school. The fears of the school board and parents were confirmed when between December of 1973 and January of 1974 thirteen boys were expelled or suspended indefinitely or drug use or tobacco use… The response of the missionary parents to this rash of bad behavior was at once expected and ironic…when missionary children began to make bad decisions, parental affection often overwhelmed parental theology. Common to parents everywhere, this chosen blindness meant that because “my child is basically good” the cause of bad behavior must be found outside of the child…Thus, with the two most likely suspects exempted from blame (the children themselves and the American cultural revolution) many drew the next natural conclusion. The school was to blame.” p157, 158

Les and I went through six weeks in hell, and no one gave a fuck but her guys. It’s a sad day when the Mafia cares more than the police department I’ve worked for the past seven goddamn years. All that hurt, all the time away from Les, was for nothing.

This is how it’s going to be from now on, Valley. I fuck you whenever I want to, wherever I want. And we will both come.

I packed our bags and headed to the Hudson Valley to escape the tourists and browse all of the delightful little bookstores nestled in quaint towns, and we returned just as the city emptied again, and life spun on.

The recaptured sense of her own childhood kept coming back to her whenever she met the two sons of the young woman who owned the bakery shop. She often saw them wandering down the trails of the valley—two fearless beings, aged seven and four. They seemed to face life as she had faced it. They did not have the look she had seen in the children of the outer world—a look of fear, half-secretive, half-sneering, the look of a child’s defense against an adult, the look of a being in the process of discovering that he is hearing lies and of learning to feel hatred.

The recaptured sense of her own childhood kept coming back to her whenever she met the two sons of the young woman who owned the bakery shop. She often saw them wandering down the trails of the valley—two fearless beings, aged seven and four. They seemed to face life as she had faced it. They did not have the look she had seen in the children of the outer world—a look of fear, half-secretive, half-sneering, the look of a child’s defense against an adult, the look of a being in the process of discovering that he is hearing lies and of learning to feel hatred. The two boys had the open, joyous, friendly confidence of kittens who do not expect to get hurt, they had an innocently natural, non-boastful sense of their own value and as innocent a trust in any stranger’s ability to recognize it, they had the eager curiosity that would venture anywhere with the certainty that life held nothing unworthy of or closed to discovery, and they looked as if, should they encounter malevolence, they would reject it contemptuously, not as dangerous, but as stupid, they would not accept it in bruised resignation as the law of existence.

Federico da Montefeltro was the hereditary ruler of Urbino, a city-state of seven thousand inhabitants a zigzagging 125-mile journey from Florence through the hills and valleys of the Apennines. Federico was almost exactly the same age as Vespasiano. Born in 1422, the illegitimate son of Guidantonio da Montefeltro, Count of Urbino, he was at first welcomed by his father since the count’s twenty-five-year marriage had failed to produce a legitimate heir. However, he found himself shunted aside when Guidantonio’s first wife died and his second marriage resulted, in 1427, in a legitimate son, Oddantonio. Federico was educated in Venice and then Mantua, and as an adolescent he distinguished himself with a series of narcissistic poems celebrating his amorous achievements. Federico’s true destiny, however, involved conquests of a different sort. At the age of fifteen he entered the service of the warlord Niccolò Piccinino, commanding a cavalry of eight hundred horses and proving himself a brilliant warrior through such feats as capturing a hitherto impregnable fortress from the ferocious Sigismondo Malatesta.

are dealing with some pretty heavy burdens of their own. I did not want to add another. You’ve shown yourself to be capable of making hard decisions, Seven. The impossible task is not for the faint of heart, and it was invoked because of your bravery. I have a strong inkling you can handle this.” “I don’t know if I can do it on my own,” Seven said. The Gran looked right into Seven’s eyes. “You don’t have to do it on your own, Seven. You are never alone—remember that. Even if the people you love and count on can’t be by your side, they are always in your heart. We will all keep a closer eye on Beefy and his magic; there are ways to keep him close to home. I know you will figure out the impossible task with Thorn and Valley. Let them help you.” The Uncle came back into the room with Valley and Thorn, talking loudly about the wonders of crystal spheres, and Seven hid the bird in her cloak. She felt terrible about being singled out. She didn’t want to be responsible for making that kind of choice. It was a lot to put on her shoulders. “Rulean, come. We must prepare healing tonics for the Witchlings to take tonight so their wounds don’t get infected.” A staircase appeared in the ground, and she floated down to some unknown room, the Town Uncle following close behind. The moment they’d left, Valley erupted. “Great, another thing to worry about,” Valley said.

Then, as I was waiting, I saw a kite come up over the valley, and I followed it with my eyes as it passed above me into the sunlight high overhead, and I asked myself why, after all, the world was not A Thousand and One Nights, the way it was when I was seven. I heard bagpipes, the goats bells, and voices carrying across the slope of roofs and the valley, and I asked myself this question many times over as I watched the kite in the air. We call them flying dragons in Sicily, as somehow they embody China or Persia in the Sicilian sky, with their sapphire and opal colors and their geometry, and watching it I couldn`t help but ask myself why, really, the faith one has at seven doesn`t last forever.

They did not immediately settle in the valley, and instead visited seasonally as part of a semi-nomadic lifestyle. This is indicated by the accounts of the Alexandrian satrap Antigonus I Monophthalmus, founder of the Antigonid dynasty after Alexander the Great’s death in 323 BCE.

Although later Roman and Byzantine developments obscured most of the Nabataean-period structures in the city, one particularly notable structure has survived on the valley floor: the Qasr al-Bint Temple. This structure was built in the first century BCE by Obodas III, and is believed to have been the chief temple of the city. Another Nabataean monument can be found at the top of the steep slopes west of the Qasr al-Bint. Known as ad-Dayr (“the Monastery”), this was the religious center of the Cult of Obodas – the deified Nabataean king.

Rome: Did You Know This? Rome is often called the Eternal City. The spirits of ancient civilizations live on in monuments and ruins that are located throughout the city. Yet Rome today is also a vibrant, modern city. Once the capital of a huge empire, Rome has been the capital of Italy since 1871. Rome is located in the central part of the Italian boot along the Tiber River. The city was once defined by the Seven Hills of Rome. Today, these hills are in the center of a sprawling city, which is home to more than 2.5 million people. Palatine Hill is rich in ancient ruins and medieval mansions. Another of the Seven Hills, Capitoline, was the site of the Roman government in ancient times, as it is today. Michelangelo designed many structures on the Capitoline. In a valley among the Seven Hills lies the Forum, the center of ancient Rome, an area surrounded by temples and palaces. Rome also thrived during the Renaissance, when cities all over Italy competed to have the greatest art and architecture. Many of the city’s great churches and fountains were built during the Renaissance.

Given that seven of the top twenty most-visited sites on the Web are porn sites, and that nearly 33 percent of all Internet searches are for terms related to sex, it’s safe to say that we’re sinking a ton of time and money into digital voyeurism.

weeks. It was the same stuff every year. Santa mugs filled with candy canes. Canisters of homemade hot chocolate mix. Starbucks cards she’d never use—not because she didn’t like coffee but because she rarely made the seven-mile drive to the nearest Starbucks. Enough cookies for a bake sale wrapped in various colors of cellophane and tied with ribbons. Garish ornaments that would never hang on her tasteful Victorian tree in the bay window—which she hadn’t even put up this year. The odd handmade scarf in a color outside a palette she would ever don. Spruce Valley was small, with distinct but overlapping social circles. Re-gifting was next to impossible, even if she waited a year, though she might be able to give away the Starbucks cards if she took them out of the envelopes. She might use the hot chocolate mix, though she never found it a bother to make hot cocoa on the stove. At least the mix would keep. She had no appetite for the cookies.

During the first week of filming, it began raining in Tunisia’s Nefta Valley for the first time in seven years and didn’t stop for four days. Equipment and vehicles bogged down in the mud, requiring assistance from the Tunisian army to pull everything out of the muck. It was often cold in the morning and blazing hot by afternoon, and Lucas would begin most days in his brown coat, hands shoved deep in the pockets as he peered through the eyepiece of the camera; as the sun rose higher in the sky, he would shrug off his coat, put on his sunglasses, and direct his actors in a checked work shirt, with a baseball cap pulled low over his eyes. When it wasn’t raining, high winds tore up the sets, ripping apart the sandcrawler and blowing one set, as a crew member put it, “halfway to Algeria.”7

The site has experienced a tremendous surge in visitor numbers over the past decade, especially following the release of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade in 1989 and Petra’s inclusion in the New Seven Wonders of the World campaign in 2007.  The valley can comfortably accommodate between one thousand and one thousand five hundred visitors per day, according to UNESCO’s Petra Management Plan.

Move over, Wife. Let a man take over,” I said. “Shall I wait until you thump your fist on your chest and let out a caveman roar? Or are you ready to go now?” “Funny.” With one hand, I set the cart in motion. From the corner of my eye, I didn’t miss another eye roll. “Do you think you can manage the cart?” Eye roll number three. I was going to try for seven today, a new record.

valley? That should be interesting for you.” “I haven’t decided what I’m doing yet.” “I’d be happy to help,” Mr. Bally said. “I’m an expert on the subject you’re studying.” He picked up one of the microfilm boxes. “Judges in these contests like primary sources.” I knew that. Judges in these contests always liked primary sources. I was already using one. “Tell me about Andover,” I’d said to Cissy Langer, sitting in her back room with a wall full of piggy dolls staring at me. “Oh, my goodness, Mimi, what a question,” she’d said. I took the glass of iced tea, and I took the plate of chocolate chip cookies, and I set my tape recorder between them. I’d borrowed it from the school librarian. “I’ve already got some primary sources,” I said to Winston Bally in the conference room. We all pick and choose the things we talk about, I guess. I’d listened to my mother and Cissy talk about growing up together for maybe hundreds of hours, about sharing a seat and red licorice ropes on the bus, about getting licked for wearing their Sunday dresses into the woods one day, about the years when they both moved back in with their parents while their husbands went to war. And somehow I’d never really noticed that all the stories started when they were ten, that there were no stories about the four-year-old Miriam, the six-year-old Cissy, about the day when they were both seven when Ruth came home from the hospital, a bundle of yellow crochet yarn and dirty diaper. It made sense, I guess, since it turned out Cissy had grown up in a place whose name I’d never even heard because it had been wiped off the map before I’d ever even been born. “My whole family lived in Andover,” Cissy said. “My mother and

The enemy’s attacks also increase during prayer. Disguised as our own thoughts, the enemy sends many memories of past sins, shameful thoughts, and messages of condemnation, designed to make us feel unworthy to seek God or ask His help. A flood of distractions about things to do makes it even more difficult to focus on God in prayer. We seldom see these attacks as signs of spiritual growth (if we weren’t growing, the devil wouldn’t trouble himself), but instead as failures, to be fixed, denied, or hidden. If the enemy can thwart or even stop our conversation with God, spiritual growth may be stopped as well. The second mansion can truly feel like a “valley of the shadow” time in which we have not learned to hold up the shield of faith or wield the sword of the Spirit. For this reason, prayers of intercession by more mature believers are essential. We are not meant to stand in the battle alone, but as part of the Body of Christ.

Until three weeks before,Lu Xin had lived on her family's millet farm on the banks of the Huan River. Passing through her river valley on his shining chariot one afternoon,the king had glimpsed Lu Xin tending the crops.He had decided that he fancied her. The next day,two militiamen had arrived at her door.She'd had to leave her family and her home. She'd had to leave De, the handsome young fisherman from the next village. Before the king's summons, De had shown Lu Xin how to fish using his pair of pet cormorants,by tying a bit of rope loosely around their necks so that they could catch several fish in their mouths but not swallow them. Watching De gently coax the fish from the depths of the funny bird's beaks,Lu Xin had fallen in love with him.The very next morning,she'd had to say goodbye to him. Forever. Or so she'd thought. It had been nineteen sunsets since Lu Xin had seen De,seven sunsets since she'd received a scroll from home with bad news: De and some other boys from the neighboring farms had run away to join the rebel army, and no sooner had he left than the kind's men had ransacked the village,looking for the deserters. With the king dead,the Shang men would show no mercy to Lu Xin,and she would never find De,never reunite with Daniel. Unless the king's council didn't find out that their king was dead.

Inside the barge, the structure was organized into three decks lined with a multitude of pens. Ventilation was a long top housing that ran the length of the box, a roofed opening a cubit high, with a hatch for bad weather. The people wondered why the boat was so large, far exceeding the capacity for their few hundred bodies on board. Then Noah told them that God was going to bring animals of every kind from the remotest parts of the land in pairs and in sevens to reside on the boat with them. They did not believe this, until the day when animals of all kinds started to arrive in the valley in numbers, ready to board the box.

Ezekiel then gives great detail as to the cleanup and burial of the massive fallen dead invaders. He tells us that the burial process will involve many men hired specifically to engage in the “continual task of passing through the land to bury.” It will require seven months to bury the dead. (Ezekiel 39:12). Ezekiel prophecies that the slain will be buried in an area that will be called the “Valley of Hamon-Gog,” literally ‘the place of many dead Russians.’ (Ezekiel 39:11).

Cecily sat back and wiped her sweating brow, stuck the trowel into the soil, then stood up and walked into the house to pour herself a glass of cool lemonade from the refrigerator. She stepped out onto the veranda to drink it and admire her handiwork. The garden was really starting to take shape now; the green lawns that swept down towards the valley were edged by beds of hibiscus and clusters of white and red poinsettias

King James Version (KJV) 9 Will the unicorn be willing to serve thee, or abide by thy crib? 10 Canst thou bind the unicorn with his band in the furrow? or will he harrow the valleys after thee?

Chris Cean: It's funny. Now everyone talks about Apple, but people don't remember how big and pervasive Atari was. At one point Atari was twenty-seven buildings in six cities. You could almost trace the outline of Silicon Valley by connecting the dots. We used to call Highway 101 "Via Atari" because you'd be driving to meetings up and down 101, and all around you there are cars with Atri parking stickers. It was that first magical wave of Silicon Valley.

Reading science, math, and philosophy one hour per day will likely put you at the upper echelon of human success within seven years.

Cruising down Compton Boulevard in the Catalina, Mickey sensed the charged atmosphere of the place, an energy that said anything could happen. Young men loitered in groups on the sidewalks in baggy T-shirts and bandannas while young women strolled up and down, smirking at the men hollering after them and whistling. When traffic lights turned red, blank-faced children appeared out of the darkness under overpasses like wraiths to sell drugs to drivers. Prostitutes wobbled along the streets on high heels, many of them with the vacant gaze of the addicted, while men with hard hearts and a lust for blood watched their every move. All the while well-intentioned families who called Compton home got ground up in the giant machine of this nation, slipping further toward poverty and the tragic moment when pressing need overtakes good intentions. Even still, Compton was no longer what it once was. Ten years ago, Mickey might not have driven through it, and certainly wouldn’t have stopped and wandered around. But the homicide rate had decreased steadily since ’94, down to forty-eight murders in ’98 from a peak of eighty-seven in ’91, and small businesses were slowly but surely returning to the city. It bothered Mickey deeply that the state of California, with an economy greater than that of most countries, wouldn’t help these people, or that the federal government of the United States, the richest country in the history of the world, wouldn’t help them either, instead spending hundreds of billions of dollars per year on warfare and destruction. The people of Compton could be lifted from poverty with the signing of a bill, and it was no wonder, when you got right down to it, why so many had resorted to crime.

As children we got so we could tell time by the sun pretty well, and would know by the light in the room when we opened our eyes that it was seven o'clock and time to get  up for school, and later that it was almost ten and then almost noon and almost three o'clock and time to be dismissed. School ran strictly by clocks, the old Regulatorsthat Mr. Hamburger was always fiddling with, adding and subtracting paper clips on the pendulum to ahieveperfect time, but we were sensitive to light, knowing how little was available to us as winter came on, and always knew what time it was - as  anyone will who leads a regular life in a familiar place. My poor great-grandpa,when his house burned down when Grandma left the bread baking in the summer kitchen oven to go visit the Berges and they built the new one facing west instead of south: they say he was confused the test of his life and never got straightened out even when he set up his bed in the parlor ( which faced north as his former bedroom had): he lived in a twilight world for some time and 5hen moved in his mind to the house he'd grown up in, and in the end didn't know one day from another until he died." Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil," but there's more than one kind of of shadow, and when a man loses track, it can kill him. Not even the siren could have saved my great- grandpa. He died of misdirection. " /

Ezekiel 39:9–16 (HCSB): “Now on that day I will give Gog a burial place there in Israel—the Valley of the Travelers east of the Sea. It will block those who travel through, for Gog and all his hordes will be buried there. So it will be called the Valley of Hamon-gog. The house of Israel will spend seven months burying them in order to cleanse the land. All the people of the land will bury them and their fame will spread on the day I display My glory.” This is the declaration of the Lord GOD. “They will appoint men on a full-time basis to pass through the land and bury the invaders who remain on the surface of the ground, in order to cleanse it. They will make their search at the end of the seven months. When they pass through the land and one of them sees a human bone, he will set up a marker next to it until the buriers have buried it in the Valley of Hamon-gog. There will even be a city named Hamonah there. So they will cleanse the land.

What would Seven, Valley, and Thorn have to gain from fake horror stories when they had enough real ones to last a lifetime?

Marcel Proust’s seven-volume opus, Remembrance of Things Past,

What happens when they do die?" asked Valley as she sat in one of the normal-looking chairs. "They turn into regular furniture," said Graves, which sent Valley almost flying out of the chair and right into Seven, who held in a laugh. "Don't wanna be embarrassing in front of your crush," whispered Seven as Valley straightened herself up.

Aphra Dimblewit sniffed. "No doubt you've heard of my aunt and uncle, then?" "Heard of them - we helped get them sent to the Tombs," Valley said, giving Seven a high five.

In early 2000, Thiel and Musk were set to meet with Mike Moritz at Sequoia’s office at 2800 Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park to discuss the merger. Musk offered Thiel a lift from Palo Alto. The year before, Musk had purchased a Magnesium Silver McLaren F1, Chassis #067, from Gerd Petrik, a German pharmaceutical executive. A $1 million sports car complete with gull-wing doors and an engine bay encased in gold foil, Musk dubbed the automobile a “work of art” and “a really beautiful piece of engineering.” Even among McLarens, #067 was distinctive—one of only seven McLaren F1s legal to drive in the United States at the time.

entered this place . . . obliged to continue my rout untill sometime after dark before I found a place sufficiently large to encamp my small party; at length such an one occurred on the lard. side. . . . from the singular appearance of this place I called it the gates of the rocky mountains.” In the morning, as the flotilla paddled its way out of the canyon, the mountains receded and a beautiful intermountain valley presented itself. But about 10:00 a.m., a distressing, worry-making sight appeared in the sky: a column of smoke, coming out of a creek drainage some seven miles west, big enough to have been deliberately set. It had to have been done by Indians, all but certainly Shoshone, and almost surely because a single Indian or a small party had heard the discharge of a rifle and set fire to the grass to warn the rest of the tribe to retreat into the interior of the mountains. That was about as bad as anything that could happen, but there was nothing to do but press on. The following day, the flotilla entered “a beautifull and extensive plain country of about 10 or 12 miles wide which extended upwards further than the eye could reach this valley is bounded by two nearly parallel ranges of high mountains which have their summits partially covered with snow.” • Lewis was within a couple of hours’ march from one of the great gold deposits, at Last Chance Gulch,

Here I was, on the trip of a lifetime: seven nights in South America, exploring the rough mountains and the ripe valleys between with my best friend of more than a decade. A cocktail so bracing and sweet, it tasted like stepping into the surf. And we still had two nights to go.

But the Bellagio’s fountain, often mocked as a symbol of water excess in the arid Southwest, may in fact represent some of the highest-value water around. The 12 million gallons a year needed to keep it topped up starts as water too salty to drink, drawn from an old well that once irrigated the Dunes Hotel golf course. Twelve million gallons sounds like a lot, but it’s really just enough to irrigate eight acres of alfalfa in the Imperial Valley.3 Total revenue at the seven giant casino–resort hotels contiguous to the fountain, at the corner of Flamingo Road and South Las Vegas Boulevard—the heart of the famed Las Vegas Strip—is an estimated $3.6 billion.4 Include all of the hotel/casino operations in the greater Las Vegas metro area, and the total rises to $21 billion.5 That compares with total agricultural revenue of $1.9 billion in all of Imperial County.6 Imperial County’s farmers get ten times the water Las Vegas gets. Las Vegas makes ten times the money Imperial County farming does. Given the crowds lining the sidewalks for each one of the fountain’s dancing-water shows, the fountains must represent one of the most economically productive uses of water you’ll find in the West.

During the bust, fuckedcompany.com—a snarky twist on the technology magazine Fast Company—became popular with the tech crowd. As its name suggested, Fucked Company logged the era’s many misadventures. Several X.com employees remembered browsing Fucked Company daily during this period—not out of schadenfreude, but out of fear that they might be next. That Confinity and X.com didn’t end up in the Valley’s discard bin was attributable to a number of factors, not least that it had enough runway to ride out a rocky year. “Back then, there were probably five to seven other little piddling online money moving services… that just got starved of oxygen over time. And they all died out by the fall,” said Vince Sollitto. Former employees point to the $100 million round’s timing as a watershed for PayPal. “I don’t think people know how precarious it was,” Klement offered. “If we hadn’t raised that $100 million round, there would be no PayPal.” Mark Woolway extended the counterfactual: “If the team hadn’t closed that one hundred million,” Woolway said, “there would be no SpaceX, no LinkedIn, and no Tesla.

Initially working out of our home in Northern California, with a garage-based lab, I wrote a one page letter introducing myself and what we had and posted it to the CEOs of twenty-two Fortune 500 companies. Within a couple of weeks, we had received seventeen responses, with invitations to meetings and referrals to heads of engineering departments. I met with those CEOs or their deputies and received an enthusiastic response from almost every individual. There was also strong interest from engineers given the task of interfacing with us. However, support from their senior engineering and product development managers was less forthcoming. We learned that many of the big companies we had approached were no longer manufacturers themselves but assemblers of components or were value-added reseller companies, who put their famous names on systems that other original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) had built. That didn't daunt us, though when helpful VPs of engineering at top-of-the-food-chain companies referred us to their suppliers, we found that many had little or no R & D capacity, were unwilling to take a risk on outside ideas, or had no room in their already stripped-down budgets for innovation. Our designs found nowhere to land. It became clear that we needed to build actual products and create an apples-to-apples comparison before we could interest potential manufacturing customers. Where to start? We created a matrix of the product areas that we believed PAX could impact and identified more than five hundred distinct market sectors-with potentially hundreds of thousands of products that we could improve. We had to focus. After analysis that included the size of the addressable market, ease of access, the cost and time it would take to develop working prototypes, the certifications and metrics of the various industries, the need for energy efficiency in the sector, and so on, we prioritized the list to fans, mixers, pumps, and propellers. We began hand-making prototypes as comparisons to existing, leading products. By this time, we were raising working capital from angel investors. It's important to note that this was during the first half of the last decade. The tragedy of September 11, 2001, and ensuing military actions had the world's attention. Clean tech and green tech were just emerging as terms, and energy efficiency was still more of a slogan than a driver for industry. The dot-com boom had busted. We'd researched venture capital firms in the late 1990s and found only seven in the United States investing in mechanical engineering inventions. These tended to be expansion-stage investors that didn't match our phase of development. Still, we were close to the famous Silicon Valley and had a few comical conversations with venture capitalists who said they'd be interested in investing-if we could turn our technology into a website. Instead, every six months or so, we drew up a budget for the following six months. Via a growing network of forward-thinking private investors who could see the looming need for dramatic changes in energy efficiency and the performance results of our prototypes compared to currently marketed products, we funded the next phase of research and business development.

Each of the seven seals reveals a part of the book. When we understand that each seal as a separate covenant, then everything makes sense.

Xavier would compare the land to his God, I knew, and His faithfulness and steadfast love. He would say how no matter what, God was always there. God had no mountains and valleys or storms and quakes. He could not erode or wash away. Eventually land would do that, I knew. But while I roamed the earth for my short life, I could rely on land to remain as it was. I could rely on God for all eternity. He never changed. He was the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow. And His faith never faltered, His trust never faded, and His love never failed. But what I was unsure of was whether I believed in such amazing love and faith. If I believed that Someone so great could actually forgive someone so wretched. Xavier would tell me He would, if only I let Him. Yet how I would reply to that, I knew not either.

One modest example of how the farmers managed to deceive the Bureau was provided by the case of Russell Giffen, one of the big landowners in the Westlands district. A Fresno rancher who stitched together seventy-seven thousand acres of valley property—about seven times the acreage of Manhattan Island—Giffen was the largest cotton grower in the world: nationally, he also ranked just behind Boswell and one other farming company in the combined federal farm subsidies he received. In the 1970s, Giffen decided to clean up his estate for probate, and sold most of the land for $32.5 million.

Mike Slade: He chose not to have surgery right away and did acupuncture, which was ultimately a fatal decision, although it took seven or eight years. John Couch: Steve overcame so many obstacles that people said were insurmountable obstacles that he probably felt that he could beat his illness on his own as well.

Ron Johnson: It was a familiar interface that was beloved. Everyone understood how to use the scroll wheel. And we could bring it out at, like, $400. To do the touch phone would be six or seven hundred dollars. So there was a long debate. There was a choice we had to make. We had to pick one, and I’m pretty sure everyone was leaning toward the iPod-phone. But Steve always leaned toward the future. Steve always leaned to the most innovative. I remember Steve saying, “If we don’t do this all-display phone, someone else might do it first—and the all-display phone is the big idea.

That’s the nature of Valley success, however: you try ten things, based mostly on random hunches, a few key product insights, and whatever internal mythologies your culture reveres. Seven of them fail miserably, are discontinued, and are soon quietly swept under the rug of “forever today” forgetfulness. Two do OK, for more or less the reasons you thought, but they don’t blow the doors off your success metric. And one, for reasons you discover only after the fact, becomes a huge, transformational success. The amnesiac tech press weaves the narrative fallacy around the proceedings, fabricating a make-believe dramatic arc from steely-eyed product ideation to flawless and unhesitating technical execution. What was an improbable bonanza at the hands of the flailing half-blind becomes the inevitable coup of the assured visionary. The world crowns you a genius, and you start acting like one. When the next usage or revenue crisis hits, you repeat the experiment, rolling your set of product dice on the big Valley table.

Every other Massachusetts town founded before 1660 was named after an English community. Of thirty-five such names, at least eighteen (57%) were drawn from East Anglia and twenty-two (63%) from seven eastern counties. Most were named after English towns within sixty miles of the village of Haverhill.2 As the Puritans moved beyond the borders of New England to other colonies, their place names continued to come from the east of England. When they settled Long Island, they named their county Suffolk. In the Connecticut Valley, their first county was called Hartford. When they founded a colony in New Jersey, the most important town was called the New Ark of the Covenant (now the modern city of Newark) and the county was named Essex. In general, the proportion of eastern and East Anglian place names in Massachusetts and its affiliated colonies was 60 percent—exactly the same as in genealogies and ship lists.

was very different. Bear in mind, Los Angeles is an unnatural oasis. It was built in and on the desert floor of a long mountain valley, which slopes gently east to west into the Pacific Ocean. Native American tribes settled the valley over seven thousand years ago and lived in relative peace until the Spanish showed up and ruined it all.

But Soli. Poor Soli. Soli met and loved and lost her man in a matter of seven days, and before she could learn that he had a villainous mother or waxy ears or an insurmountable fear of bees, he was gone. She fell in love with the pure essence of Checo the train rider, Checo the pioneer. And before she could settle into the normalcy of their attachment, he had vanished among dust clouds and a spray of bullets. Whether he'd made it to safety or fallen there on the valley floor, Soli could not know.

She studied his face, the chiseled lines and valleys, the square chin and solid jaw. There was something different this morning, but she couldn’t quite figure… “You shaved,” she blurted out, feeling like an idiot the instant the words let her mouth. His lips curved up. She remembered exactly the way they felt pressing into hers and a little sliver of heat trickled into her belly. “Believe it or not, I shave every once in a while.” “You look good.” God, did he. If she’d thought he was handsome before, now she realized how disturbingly attractive he was. “Do I?” A hint of color crept beneath the bones in his cheeks. “Then I guess I’ll have to do it more often.” He glanced down at the metal detector. “How’s it going? Found anything yet?” “Not yet. I don’t think I’ve quite got the hang of this thing, but tomorrow we clean out the sluice box. Hopefully, something will turn up then.” He nodded, began to look off toward his house like he wanted to escape. Or maybe only part of him wanted to leave. She gathered her courage and plunged in. “I still say I owe you for your very timely rescue. How about supper?” “Supper?” “Just a neighborly sort of thing. If you don’t already have plans, that is. I was thinking maybe tomorrow evening.” He looked uncertain, torn in some way. “Well, I…yeah, tomorrow night sounds all right.” “You won’t attack me again, will you?” she teased just to make him feel at ease, and he relaxed a little. “Not unless you ask me real nice.” Her own smile turned wobbly. Surely she could trust herself--couldn’t she? “Okay, then. Supper tomorrow evening. Seven o’clock okay?” “Fine. I’ll see you at seven.” He started walking toward the path leading back to his house. “By the way,” she called after him, “how is it you always seem to know what I’m doing over here?” He turned to her and actually grinned. “Binoculars. A good woodsman always knows what’s going on around him.” Her mouth dropped open. “Binoculars! You’ve been watching me with binoculars?” Call kept on walking. “They come in real handy up here,” he said over one wide shoulder. “You ought to get yourself a pair.” Charity sputtered, opened her mouth, then snapped it closed again and simply stood there fuming. Binoculars! She watched him disappear down the trail, so amazed she couldn’t get a single ugly name past her lips.

Chinese and American companies have already kick-started this process, leaping out to massive leads over the rest of the world. Canada, the United Kingdom, France, and a few other countries play host to top-notch talent and research labs, but they often lack the other ingredients needed to become true AI superpowers: a large base of users and a vibrant entrepreneurial and venture-capital ecosystem. Other than London’s DeepMind, we have yet to see groundbreaking AI companies emerge from these countries. All of the seven AI giants and an overwhelming portion of the best AI engineers are already concentrated in the United States and China. They are building huge stores of data that are feeding into a variety of different product verticals, such as self-driving cars, language translation, autonomous drones, facial recognition, natural-language processing, and much more. The more data these companies accumulate, the harder it will be for companies in any other countries to ever compete.

In terms of funding, Google dwarfs even its own government: U.S. federal funding for math and computer science research amounts to less than half of Google’s own R&D budget. That spending spree has bought Alphabet an outsized share of the world’s brightest AI minds. Of the top one hundred AI researchers and engineers, around half are already working for Google. The other half are distributed among the remaining Seven Giants, academia, and a handful of smaller startups. Microsoft and Facebook have soaked up substantial portions of this group, with Facebook bringing on superstar researchers like Yann LeCun. Of the Chinese giants, Baidu went into deep-learning research earliest—even trying to acquire Geoffrey Hinton’s startup in 2013 before being outbid by Google—and scored a major coup in 2014 when it recruited Andrew Ng to head up its Silicon Valley AI Lab.

If a Tokyoite knows anything about Nakano, it's likely to be Nakano Broadway, a shopping mall with several floors devoted to Japanese comics (manga) and animation (anime). It is geek central. I found most of it incomprehensible, but I did enjoy browsing at Junkworld, which sells useful electronic discards, like old working digital cameras for $5 and assorted connectors and dongles and sound cards. In the 1980's, when William Gibson was padding around the streets of Tokyo and inventing the world of Neuromancer, Japan was the place where the future had already arrived, where you could find electronic toys that wouldn't hit American shelves for years, if ever. For a variety of reasons (blogs and online shopping, advances in international shipping, the fact that the coolest mobile phones are now designed in Silicon Valley and Seoul), this is no longer true. While it's still fun to go to Akihabara at night and shop all seven floors of a neon-lit electronics superstore, you won't bring home any objects of nerdy wet dreams.

GOOGLE VERSUS THE REST But if the next deep learning is destined to be discovered in the corporate world, Google has the best shot at it. Among the Seven AI Giants, Google—more precisely, its parent company, Alphabet, which owns DeepMind and its self-driving subsidiary Waymo—stands head and shoulders above the rest.

I don’t have any other family. Only Finn, my brother. My parents were killed in a flying accident when they were caught in a blizzard a few year ago. Most of the bevy was lost, it was so horrible. Then there’s the rest of my herd, eight of us, including me.” Kellan’s shoulders slumped. “Well, seven now. And I guess I should stop referring to them as my herd.” Vic settled on the floor at his feet, the large man gazing up at him with compassion. “You’re not alone, Kellan, I promise. Vale Valley exists for a reason, to be that shining beacon for those of us who’ve been cast aside.” Vic clasped his hand. “I lost my family too when a deadly virus tore through our pack. But I’ve found a home and community and have built a good life here. Everyone’s going to welcome you with open arms, I promise.” A measure of peace filled him. Vale Valley could only be a million times better than living with his rotten brother or any of the other vicious members of his herd. Ex-herd. Kellan smiled. “Thank you for everything, Vic. Especially for staying here with me tonight

seven giants of the AI age.. google, facebook, amazon, microsoft, baidu, alibaba, tencent

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The record of legislation passed and signed into law is simply astonishing. March 9. Roosevelt signed the Emergency Banking Relief Act. March 20. Roosevelt signed the Economy Act, reorganizing the government and cutting salaries and the pensions of veterans—perhaps the most potent lobby in Washington at that time—to reduce expenses by $500 million. March 21. Roosevelt signed the Civilian Conservation Corps Reforestation Relief Act, to employ up to 250,000 young men in construction and environmental projects. March 22. Roosevelt signed the Beer-Wine Revenue Act, legalizing beer and wine with less than 4 percent alcohol and taxing it heavily to increase government revenue. April 19. Roosevelt took the country off the gold standard, demonetized gold by making gold coins no longer legal tender and recalling them to the Treasury, and forbidding citizens to hold bullion. The next year he devalued the dollar from $20.66 to an ounce of gold to $35.00. May 12. Roosevelt signed the Federal Emergency Relief Act to provide grants totaling $500 million to states to fund relief for the unemployed. May 12. Roosevelt also signed the Agricultural Adjustment Act to relieve farmers with measures to raise farm prices, limit production, and refinance farm mortgages. May 18. Roosevelt signed the bill authorizing the establishment of the Tennessee Valley Authority to develop the Tennessee River Valley by building dams that would provide electric power in seven states. May 27. Roosevelt signed the Federal Securities Act, which required full disclosure of pertinent information to investors, the first federal regulation of the securities business. June 5. Congress by joint resolution canceled clauses in contracts requiring payment in gold. June 6. Roosevelt signed the National Employment Act establishing the U.S. Employment Service to work with state employment agencies to help the unemployed find jobs. June 13. Roosevelt signed the Home Owners Refinancing Act establishing the Home Owners Loan Corporation, which was empowered to issue $2 billion in bonds to help nonfarm home owners keep their properties. June 16. Roosevelt signed the Banking Act of 1933, usually known as the Glass-Steagall Act after its congressional sponsors. It revolutionized American banking.

I’m not sure if this is assimilation, if all this was part of it and this is how other people have experienced it, too. That assimilation has always required that one believed the old country was old and left behind for a reason, and we must never speak of it because we are Americans now, which means we speak perfect English at all times and never Spanish at home or anywhere else and our history is the Revolution and Valley Forge and the Battle of Gettysburg and four score to seven years ago our fathers who art in heaven do highly resolve that these dead should not have died in vain, and to the republic for which it stands one nation under hamburgers and strip malls with peace and injustice for all.

Consequently, some of the licensees in Hejaz regretted the coming of a native ruler. Particularly in Mecca and Jidda public opinion was against an Arab state. The mass of citizens were foreigners — Egyptians, Indians, Javanese, Africans, and others — quite unable to sympathize with the Arab aspirations, especially as voiced by Beduin; for the Beduin lived on what he could exact from the stranger on his roads, or in his valleys; and he and the townsman bore each other a perpetual grudge.

We won't do anything that Valley wouldn't do," Seven said. "That... doesn't inspire me with much confidence.

Witches like that get away with everything. You know that," Dusk said, looking at Valley. "Not this time," Valley said under her breath, and Seven was in agreement. This time, they would make them pay.