Thirteen Days Book Quotes

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. It was the future, and everything sucked.

You can tell all of us are morphing into full-blown adults, wingtip adults, because all the time now the Big Question is, What are you going to do? After the summer, about your scholarship, about choosing a college, after graduation, with the rest of your life. When you are thirteen, the question is, Smooth or crunchy? That's it. Later, at the onset of full-blown adulthood, the Big Question changes a little bit - instead of, What are you going to do? it turns into, What do you do? I hear it all the time when my parents have parties, all the men standing around. After they talk sports, they always ask, What do you do? It's just part of the code that they mean "for a living" because no one ever answers it by saying, I go for walks and listen to music full-blast and don't care about my hearing thirty years from now, and I drink milk out of the carton, and I cough when someone lights up a cigarette, and I dig rainy days because they make me sad in a way I like, and I read books until I fall asleep holding them, and I put on sock-shoe, sock-shoe instead of sock-sock, shoe-shoe because I think it's better luck. Never that. People are always in something. I'm in advertising. I'm in real estate. I'm in sales and marketing.

Special Agent Brad Wolgast hated Texas. He hated everything about it. [...] He hated the billboards and the freeways and the faceless subdivisions and the Texas flag, which flew over everything, always as big as a circus tent; he hated the giant pickup trucks everybody drove, no matter that gas was thirteen bucks a gallon and the world was slowly seaming itself to death like a package of peas in a microwave. He hated the boots and the belts and the way people talked, ya'll this and ya'll that, as if they spent the day ropin' and ridin', not cleaning teeth and selling insurance and doing the books, like people did everywhere.

I want people to see and hear the things I see and hear. And I want them to remember how it was when they were children. I don't want them to grow up entirely. Every adult is the creation of a child. My own signature, that identifying scrawl required by parcel postmen and valued by a handful of comic-book fans, that signature was devised by a thirteen-year-old boy who thought I'd want to seem important one day. I am stuck with it. My life is the result of that boy's dreams and limitations, and of the company that boy kept a long time ago, back when things could still happen for the first time.

About the Author Terry Pratchett is one of the most popular living authors in the world. His first story was published when he was thirteen, and his first full-length book when he was twenty. He worked as a journalist to support the writing habit, but gave up the day job when the success of his books meant that it was costing him money to go to work.

Imagine the impossible and one day it will be possible.

I’m writing a book, one letter at a time. After thirteen days, I just finished writing “Once upon a time.” Since it’s a fairy tale, it’s obviously a romance novel, along the lines of “All Quiet on the Western Front.

Newspapers printed stories of variable accuracy, beginning with a twenty-six-line account in the loyalist Boston News-Letter on April 20, deploring “this shocking introduction to all the miseries of a civil war.” The New-Hampshire Gazette’s headline read, “Bloody News.” In barely three weeks, the first reports of the day’s action would reach Charleston and Savannah. Lurid rumors spread quickly: of grandfathers shot in their beds, of families burned alive, of pregnant women bayoneted. Americans in thirteen colonies were alarmed, aroused, angry. “The times are very affecting,” Reverend Ezra Stiles told his diary in Rhode Island on April 23.

Natural philosophy is the genius that has regulated my fate; I desire, therefore, in this narration, to state those facts which led to my predilection for that science. When I was thirteen years of age, we all went on a party of pleasure to the baths near Thonon: the inclemency of the weather obliged us to remain a day confined to the inn. In this house I chanced to find a volume of the works of Cornelius Agrippa. I opened it with apathy; the theory which he attempts to demonstrate, and the wonderful facts which he relates, soon changed this feeling into enthusiasm. A new light seemed to dawn upon my mind; and, bounding with joy, I communicated my discovery to my father. My father looked carelessly at the title page of my book, and said, "Ah! Cornelius Agrippa! My dear Victor, do not waste your time upon this; it is sad trash." If, instead of this remark, my father had taken the pains to explain to me that the principles of Agrippa had been entirely exploded, and that a modern system of science had been introduced, which possessed much greater powers than the ancient, because the powers of the latter were chimerical, while those of the former were real and practical; under such circumstances, I should certainly have thrown Agrippa aside, and have contented my imagination, warmed as it was, by returning with greater ardour to my former studies. It is even possible that the train of my ideas would never have received the fatal impulse that led to my ruin. But the cursory glance my father had taken of my volume by no means assured me that he was acquainted with its contents; and I continued to read with the greatest avidity.

I made a little book, in which I allotted a page for each of the virtues. I rul’d each page with red ink, so as to have seven columns, one for each day of the week, marking each column with a letter for the day. I cross’d these columns with thirteen red lines, marking the beginning of each line with the first letter of one of the virtues, on which line, and in its proper column, I might mark, by a little black spot, every fault I found upon examination to have been committed respecting that virtue upon that day.

As an author the question I get asked the most is, “why do you write?” My knee jerk response is, “Because I love it,” which is true, but not the whole truth. So here is my revised response to that question; “I write for the thirteen year old me who hated reading and craved something different than the boring literature I was forced to read for school. I write to see something I want to read exist in the world. I write because it becomes unbearable to hold so many stories in my head without a way to express them, but most importantly, I write to be true to myself.

The men who had inhabited prehistoric Egypt, who had carved the Sphinx and founded the world‘s oldest civilization, were men who had made their exodus from Atlantis to settle on this strip of land that bordered the Nile. And they had left before their ill-fated continent sank to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, a catastrophe which had drained the Sahara and turned it into a desert. The shells which to-day litter the surface of the Sahara in places, as well as the fossil fish which are found among its sands, prove that it was once covered by the waters of a vast ocean. It was a tremendous and astonishing thought that the Sphinx provided a solid, visible and enduring link between the people of to-day and the people of a lost world, the unknown Atlanteans. This great symbol has lost its meaning for the modern world, for whom it is now but an object of local curiosity. What did it mean to the Atlanteans? We must look for some hint of an answer in the few remnants of culture still surviving from peoples whose own histories claimed Atlantean origin. We must probe behind the degenerate rituals of races like the Incas and the Mayas, mounting to the purer worship of their distant ancestors, and we shall find that the loftiest object of their worship was Light, represented by the Sun. Hence they build pyramidal Temples of the Sun throughout ancient America. Such temples were either variants or slightly distorted copies of similar temples which had existed in Atlantis. After Plato went to Egypt and settled for a while in the ancient School of Heliopolis, where he lived and studied during thirteen years, the priest-teachers, usually very guarded with foreigners, favoured the earnest young Greek enquirer with information drawn from their well-preserved secret records. Among other things they told him that a great flat-topped pyramid had stood in the centre of the island of Atlantis, and that on this top there had been build the chief temple of the continent – a sun temple. […] The Sphinx was the revered emblem in stone of a race which looked upon Light as the nearest thing to God in this dense material world. Light is the subtlest, most intangible of things which man can register by means of one of his five senses. It is the most ethereal kind of matter which he knows. It is the most ethereal element science can handle, and even the various kind of invisible rays are but variants of light which vibrate beyond the power of our retinas to grasp. So in the Book of Genesis the first created element was Light, without which nothing else could be created. „The Spirit of God moved upon the face of the Deep,“ wrote Egyptian-trained Moses. „And God said, Let there be Light: and there was Light.“ Not only that, it is also a perfect symbol of that heavenly Light which dawns within the deep places of man‘s soul when he yields heart and mind to God; it is a magnificent memorial to that divine illumination which awaits him secretly even amid the blackest despairs. Man, in turning instinctively to the face and presence of the Sun, turns to the body of his Creator. And from the sun, light is born: from the sun it comes streaming into our world. Without the sun we should remain perpetually in horrible darkness; crops would not grow: mankind would starve, die, and disappear from the face of this planet. If this reverence for Light and for its agent, the sun, was the central tenet of Atlantean religion, so also was it the central tenet of early Egyptian religion. Ra, the sun-god, was first, the father and creator of all the other gods, the Maker of all things, the One, the self-born [...] If the Sphinx were connected with this religion of Light, it would surely have some relationship with the sun.

Convinced that struggle was the crucible of character, Rockefeller faced a delicate task in raising his children. He wanted to accumulate wealth while inculcating in them the values of his threadbare boyhood. The first step in saving them from extravagance was keeping them ignorant of their father’s affluence. Until they were adults, Rockefeller’s children never visited his office or refineries, and even then they were accompanied by company officials, never Father. At home, Rockefeller created a make-believe market economy, calling Cettie the “general manager” and requiring the children to keep careful account books.16They earned pocket money by performing chores and received two cents for killing flies, ten cents for sharpening pencils, five cents per hour for practicing their musical instruments, and a dollar for repairing vases. They were given two cents per day for abstaining from candy and a dime bonus for each consecutive day of abstinence. Each toiled in a separate patch of the vegetable garden, earning a penny for every ten weeds they pulled up. John Jr. got fifteen cents an hour for chopping wood and ten cents per day for superintending paths. Rockefeller took pride in training his children as miniature household workers. Years later, riding on a train with his thirteen-year-old daughter, he told a traveling companion, “This little girl is earning money already. You never could imagine how she does it. I have learned what my gas bills should average when the gas is managed with care, and I have told her that she can have for pin money all that she will save every month on this amount, so she goes around every night and keeps the gas turned down where it is not needed.”17 Rockefeller never tired of preaching economy and whenever a package arrived at home, he made a point of saving the paper and string. Cettie was equally vigilant. When the children clamored for bicycles, John suggested buying one for each child. “No,” said Cettie, “we will buy just one for all of them.” “But, my dear,” John protested, “tricycles do not cost much.” “That is true,” she replied. “It is not the cost. But if they have just one they will learn to give up to one another.”18 So the children shared a single bicycle. Amazingly enough, the four children probably grew up with a level of creature comforts not that far above what Rockefeller had known as a boy.

The judicial methods used by the Communists in our day are the same as those of the Holy Inquisition. To secure the Reign of Terror, the Communists are as brutal as the Christian Church was during a long period of thirteen hundred years, for the same end. Christianity and Communism, - the Judaic Twins - in merciless brutality do not differ from each other. - The history book of the Holy Inquisition became the textbook of the Communist secret police.

Structure of the Calendar When we talk about the Mayan Calendar, we are really talking about two calendars—one that measures ordinary time, and one that measures sacred time. These two calendars interpenetrate in such a way as to integrate and synthesize the secular and sacred dimensions of reality. In this book we shall be primarily concerned with the measure of ritual time, usually called the tzolk’in and sometimes referred to as the Ritual Almanac or Divinatory Almanac. We do not know what the ancient Maya called this ritual or sacred aspect of the Calend a r . M o s t s c h o l a r s u s e t h e Y u c a t e c t e r m t z o l k’i n (f ro m tzol = count and k’in = day, hence "count of days"), but this term may not have been used by the Classic Maya and is in fact based on the equivalent K’iche’ term ch’olq’ij. 1 The tzolk’in is a unique method of reckoning time. It consists of twenty named days combined with thirteen numbers. Each day-name is repeated thirteen times during the Calendar cycle, for a total of 260 days (13 x 20 = 260). The twenty days, with their glyphs, directional correspondences, Mayan names, and some of their most common English meanings, are shown here as “The Names of the Days.

Thirteen Reasons I Don’t Go to Sporting Events Anymore 1. Every time I went, they asked me for money. 2. The people sitting in my row didn’t seem very friendly. 3. The seats were very hard. 4. The coach never came to visit me. 5. The referees made a decision I didn’t agree with. 6. I was sitting with hypocrites—they only came to see what others were wearing! 7. Some games went into overtime, and I was late getting home. 8. The marching band played some songs I had never heard before. 9. The games are scheduled on my only day to sleep in and run errands. 10. My parents took me to too many games when I was growing up. 11. Since I read a book on sports, I feel that I know more than the coaches anyway. 12. I don’t want to take my children because I want them to choose for themselves what sport they like best. 13. I can play sports anywhere, I don’t need to go to a stadium. Do these reasons sound familiar? Have you lost your passion for local church ministry? Are you treating Jesus’ bride like a social club or an extra-curricular activity?

It was on July 2, 1776 that the Second Continental Congress voted for the legal separation of the Thirteen Colonies from Great Britain. On July 1, 1776, in anticipation of this great day, John Adams wrote to his wife Abigail that Independence Day, would be the most memorable day in the history of America. He wrote “I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated by succeeding generations as the great anniversary festival.” He was right about the day; however he was off regarding the actual signing by two days. Americans now celebrate Independence Day on July 4th, since the resolution of independence was debated on in a closed session of Congress and the Congressional Vote didn’t take place until July 4, 1776. Independence Day has become a National Day to be celebrated with friends enjoying barbecues, picnics and patriotic concerts. So it will be on this day with me. Yesterday I learned that my book “Suppressed I Rise” had been selected for two awards by the Florida Authors & Publishers Association, to be conferred next month at the Hilton Hotel in Disney World. Although July 4th is our nations “Independence Day” it will have additional meaning for me and my friends who have contributed so much of themselves to make these awards a reality. This year the 4th of July will certainly have a special significance to me.

In 1999, a bunch of researchers published a study of about 1,600 adults examined in order to come up with equations to estimate kidney function. Just plug in the patient’s creatinine, age (because adults tend to lose muscle mass as we get older), and gender (because men tend to have more muscle mass than women), and voila!—an estimate of kidney function. Most laboratories can do this for us now. A rising creatinine level in the blood means the kidneys are not able to pee creatinine out as well as they used to, so the person’s estimated kidney function is lower. But wait—if the patient is Black, the study determined that you have to multiply by 1.2 to get a more accurate estimate. This finding was attributed to Blacks in the study having higher muscle mass than Whites and, therefore, higher amounts of creatinine in their bodies. Laboratories report the eGFR, and just below it, the eGFR if Black. Of course one of the problems with generalizations is that they aren’t always true. In medicine, in particular, they make us lazy and we often accept them without question—especially when they are in line with our underlying assumptions and beliefs. Like the belief that Black and African are inherently different from White and European at a DNA level, a belief that dates back to the days when American researchers were measuring Black-White differences in skull size to prove Black inferiority and justify slavery. But I wonder how often health-care providers make the mental adjustment that the “race adjustment” is really a proxy for muscle mass rather than just focusing on the race of the person in front of them when they are assessing lab results. I wonder if the person in front of them were a White male bodybuilder how many would tell him the race-adjusted estimate of kidney function, or a skinny Black woman the non-race-adjusted estimate. Then too I wonder how many health-care practitioners realize that equations derived from the original study of 1,600 people only included about 200 Blacks—and no American Samoans, no Hispanics, no Asians. These groups have very different body frames, but all are simply “not Black” in our equations. The implication, then, is that only Black people are different. This shortcut has the potential for a significant negative impact on Black patients who happen to not have a high muscle mass. Patients like Book of Eli. When the non-race-adjusted eGFR is 20 (when a person can be placed on the waiting list), the race-adjusted value is closer to 25. Just as the difference between eGFRs of 20 and 10 can be several years for many patients, so can the difference between 25 and 20. Years of accruing time on the kidney transplant waiting list when thirteen people on the waiting list die every day waiting for a kidney.

A couple of weeks before, while going over a Variety list of the most popular songs of 1935 and earlier, to use for the picture’s sound track – which was going to consist only of vintage recording played not as score but as source music – my eye stopped on a .933 standard, words by E.Y. (“Yip”) Harburg (with producer Billy Rose), music by Harold Arlen, the team responsible for “Over the Rainbow”, among many notable others, together and separately. Legend had it that the fabulous Ms. Dorothy Parker contributed a couple of lines. There were just two words that popped out at me from the title of the Arlen-Harburg song, “It’s Only a Paper Moon”. Not only did the sentiment of the song encapsulate metaphorically the main relationship in our story – Say, it’s only a paper moon Sailing over a cardboard sea But it wouldn’t be make-believe If you believed in me – the last two words of the title also seemed to me a damn good movie title. Alvin and Polly agreed, but when I tried to take it to Frank Yablans, he wasn’t at all impressed and asked me what it meant. I tried to explain. He said that he didn’t “want us to have our first argument,” so why didn’t we table this conversation until the movie was finished? Peter Bart called after a while to remind me that, after all, the title Addie Pray was associated with a bestselling novel. I asked how many copies it had sold in hardcover. Peter said over a hundred thousand. That was a lot of books but not a lot of moviegoers. I made that point a bit sarcastically and Peter laughed dryly. The next day I called Orson Welles in Rome, where he was editing a film. It was a bad connection so we had to speak slowly and yell: “Orson! What do you think of this title?!” I paused a beat or two, then said very clearly, slowly and with no particular emphasis or inflection: “Paper …Moon!” There was a silence for several moments, and then Orson said, loudly, “That title is so good, you don’t even need to make the picture! Just release the title! Armed with that reaction, I called Alvin and said, “You remember those cardboard crescent moons they have at amusement parks – you sit in the moon and have a picture taken?” (Polly had an antique photo of her parents in one of them.) We already had an amusement park sequence in the script so, I continued to Alvin, “Let’s add a scene with one of those moons, then we can call the damn picture Paper Moon!” And this led eventually to a part of the ending, in which we used the photo Addie had taken of herself as a parting gift to Moze – alone in the moon because he was too busy with Trixie to sit with his daughter – that she leaves on the truck seat when he drops her off at her aunt’s house. … After the huge popular success of the picture – four Oscar nominations (for Tatum, Madeline Kahn, the script, the sound) and Tatum won Best Supporting Actress (though she was the lead) – the studio proposed that we do a sequel, using the second half of the novel, keeping Tatum and casting Mae West as the old lady; they suggested we call the new film Harvest Moon. I declined. Later, a television series was proposed, and although I didn’t want to be involved (Alvin Sargent became story editor), I agreed to approve the final casting, which ended up being Jodie Foster and Chris Connolly, both also blondes. When Frank Yablans double-checked about my involvement, I passed again, saying I didn’t think the show would work in color – too cute – and suggested they title the series The Adventures of Addie Pray. But Frank said, “Are you kidding!? We’re calling it Paper Moon - that’s a million-dollar title!” The series ran thirteen episodes.

The Alamo is a story we've learned to tell ourselves to justify violence, both real and imagined, first against Mexicans, then Tejanos, then Mexican-Americans, and eventually the Vietcong and al-Qaeda. "Remember the Alamo" was the battle cry that we recycle long past the fight's utility. How Mexican-Americans were shamed in Texas History classes, how politicians and bureaucrats have changed that history over the years, and any number of other episodes that make up the back half of this book tell us more about who we are now than what we thought we knew about what happened over thirteen days in 1836. That is the history that we need to learn, because we are repeating it ceaselessly. Maybe it's time to forget the Alamo, or at least the whitewashed story, and start telling the history that includes everyone. Problems arise when there's an official version of events. Texas is big enough to tell an expansive, inclusive story about the Alamo, what really happened before, how it really went down, how we wrestled over who had the right to tell the story, and why we're still fighting about it today. We do not and will not agree completely on the events. It'd be a strange place if we did and one we're sure we wouldn't like. From a practical perspective, we must do something with Alamo Plaza. It desperately needs a refresh. But spending $450 million to build a monument to white supremacy as personified by Bowie, Travis, and Crockett would be a grave injustice to a city that desperately needs better schools, jobs, and services. If Phil Collins wants to "Remember the Alamo," he is welcom to do so in the privacy of this own home. The rest of us need to forget what we learned about the Alamo, embrace the truth, and celebrate all Texans.

At home, Rockefeller created a make-believe market economy, calling Cettie the “general manager” and requiring the children to keep careful account books.16They earned pocket money by performing chores and received two cents for killing flies, ten cents for sharpening pencils, five cents per hour for practicing their musical instruments, and a dollar for repairing vases. They were given two cents per day for abstaining from candy and a dime bonus for each consecutive day of abstinence. Each toiled in a separate patch of the vegetable garden, earning a penny for every ten weeds they pulled up. John Jr. got fifteen cents an hour for chopping wood and ten cents per day for superintending paths. Rockefeller took pride in training his children as miniature household workers. Years later, riding on a train with his thirteen-year-old daughter, he told a traveling companion, “This little girl is earning money already. You never could imagine how she does it. I have learned what my gas bills should average when the gas is managed with care, and I have told her that she can have for pin money all that she will save every month on this amount, so she goes around every night and keeps the gas turned down where it is not needed.

You know one of the things I dislike most? False advertising. When I was a young kid, I stumbled across an ad in the back of a comic book. Some company was selling magic shrinking dust in a small bottle for only $9.99, plus shipping and handling. The ad featured a life-size cartoon of a young boy with his miniature parents and pets hanging out in the pockets of his shirt and jeans. I remember thinking, Now that’s what I am talking about! I saved my money for months and mailed thirteen dollars to the address in the magazine. I went out to the mailbox every day in great anticipation of my magic dust arriving. Hey, I also didn’t want anyone finding the package before me, because I planned on making a few surprise changes around the Robertson house. Well, the package never arrived. Since I was a kid, I figured there must have been some sort of shipping mishap—until I took a class called physics in school! Then I realized I’d been duped through the power of marketing.

Of course, I know many fine rich people,” the Governor said, perhaps thinking of his campaign contributors. “But most of them are like a rich old feller I know down in Plaquemines Parish, who died one night and never done nobody no good in his life, and yet, when the Devil come to get him, he took an appeal to St. Peter. “’I done some good things on earth,’ he said. ‘Once, on a cold day in about 1913, I gave a blind man a nickel.’ St. Peter looked all through the records, and at last, on page four hundred and seventy-one, he found the entry. ‘That ain’t enough to make up for a misspent life,’ he said. ‘But, wait,’ the rich man says. ‘Now I remember, in 1922 I give five cents to a poor widow woman that had no carfare.’ St. Peter’s clerk checked the book again, and on page thirteen hundred and seventy-one, after pages and pages of this old stump-wormer loan-sharked the poor, he found the record of that nickel. “’That ain’t neither enough,’ St. Peter said. But the mean old thing yelled, ‘Don’t, sentence me yet. In about 1931 I give a nickel to the Red Cross.’ The clerk found that entry, too. So he said to St. Peter, ‘Your Honor, what are we going to do with him?’” The crowd hung on Uncle Earl’s lips the way the bugs hovered in the light. “You know what St. Peter said?” The Governor, the only one in the courthouse square who knew the answer, asked. There was, naturally, no reply. “He said: ‘Give that man back his fifteen cents and tell him to go to Hell.

Our day-to-day activities and labor under the sun are reconciled with YHWH’s prophetic calendar and the lunar cycle by the thirteenth month. Each day we labor reminds us of our sin and the curse of sin upon the earth. Each night we look up into the sky and are reminded of YHWH’s promise of reconciliation and the eventual restoration of mankind through Jesus, or Yeshua, the promised Messiah. Matthew, in the first chapter of the first book of the New Testament, emphasizes the numbers thirteen and fourteen in relation to the lineage of Jesus, the Messiah. What were the four words Matthew chiseled over the three-column list we found?

Of Franklin’s thirteen subjects, I chose six, then substituted seven others which I thought would be more helpful to me in my business, subjects in which I was especially weak. Here is my list, and the order in which I used them: Enthusiasm. Order: self-organization. Think in terms of others’ interests. Questions. Key issue. Silence: listen. Sincerity: deserve confidence. Knowledge of my business. Appreciation and praise. Smile: happiness. Remember names and faces. Service and prospecting. Closing the sale: action. I made up a 3″ x 5″ card, a “pocket reminder,” for each one of my subjects, with a brief summary of the principles, similar to the “pocket reminders” you have found throughout this book. The first week, I carried the card on Enthusiasm in my pocket. At odd moments during the day, I read these principles. Just for that one week, I determined to double the amount of enthusiasm that I had been putting into my selling, and into my life. The second week, I carried my card on Order: self-organization. And so on each week. After I completed the first thirteen weeks, and started all over again with my first subject—Enthusiasm— I knew I was getting a better hold on myself. I began to feel an inward power that I had never known before. Each week, I gained a clearer understanding of my subject. It got down deeper inside of me. My business became more interesting. It became exciting!

The first thought that I want to share centers around self-doubt. There have been days that I truly do not know how I was able to function. There have been days that I have felt I could no longer carry the weight and burden of working full time and taking care of the things at home. It is normal to feel that you have been pushed to a place where you are unable to do any more. It’s OK to think, “I can’t do this.” I have spent many hours talking with God over the thirteen years we have been together. These are deep, intimate conversations where I have told him I was in over my head. I have come home on many occasions after a long day and had to cook, clean up, or do both when I had no gas left in my tank. I have been honest to say in this book that I am not perfect and have a tendency to grumble. If you’re the spouse, it’s OK to grumble to yourself. It’s OK to feel that you cannot do any more, but it is not OK to take those thoughts or feelings out on the one you love. They most likely are already feeling that they are not good enough for you. They most likely feel that they are not carrying their workload.

What would you be willing to sacrifice to have a loved one back for a minute, a day, or a lifetime?" After my son Alex was killed by a drunk driver, I had a dream in which I was asked this question. Once I started thinking about it, I realized I would give up everything, and it later evolved into a science fiction book. I modeled the main character after my son. Alex's mannerisms and attitude became the basis for Xavier's character development. Xavier is a clone who does not know he is a clone nor who is controlling his fate. With his friends' help, he must uncover the people behind the conspiracy to create a shadow government and locate the others known as the Zodiac Thirteen.

During the next two years, the immensity of the Titanic tragedy would be pored over in many books, magazines, and newspaper specials, but in the summer of 1914 came the start of the First World War and deaths on a previously unimaginable scale. On the first day of the Battle of the Somme, more than twenty thousand British troops were killed—the equivalent of thirteen Titanic disasters. By the end of the conflict, almost six million soldiers fighting against Germany had lost their lives. The war helped push the Titanic to the back of people’s minds as words such as tragedy and disaster took on new and deeper meanings. 15

Special Agent Brad Wolgast hated Texas. He hated everything about it. He hated the weather, which was hot as an oven one minute and freezing the next, the air so damp it felt like a wet towel over your head. He hated the look of the place, beginning with the trees, which were scrawny and pathetic, their limbs all gnarled up like something out of Dr. Seuss, and the flat, windblown nothingness of it. He hated the billboards and the freeways and faceless subdivisions and the Texas flag, which flew over everything, always big as a circus tent; he hated the giant pickup trucks everybody drove, no matter that gas was thirteen bucks a gallon and the world was slowly steaming itself to death like a package of peas in a microwave. He hated the boots and the belt buckles and the way people talked, y’all this and y’all that, as if they spent the day ropin’ and ridin’, not cleaning teeth and selling insurance and doing the books, like people did everywhere.

The original flagship for the company was the MS City of New York, commanded by Captain George T. Sullivan, On March 29, 1942, she was attacked off the coast of Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, by the German submarine U-160. The torpedo struck the MS City of New York at the waterline under the ship’s bridge, instantly disabling her. After allowing the survivors to get into lifeboats the submarine sunk the ship. Almost two days after the attack, a destroyer, the USS Roper, rescued 70 survivors, of which 69 survived. An additional 29 others were picked up by USS Acushnet, formerly a seagoing tugboat and revenue cutter, operated by the U.S. Coast Guard. All these survivors were taken to the Naval Base in Norfolk, Virginia. Almost two weeks later, on April 11, 1942, a U.S. Army bomber on its way to Europe spotted a lifeboat drifting in the Gulf Stream. The boat contained six passengers: four women, one man and a young girl plus thirteen crew members. Tragically two of the women died of exposure. The eleven survivors picked up by the U.S. Coast Guard Cutter CG-455 and were brought to Lewes, Delaware. The final count showed that seven passengers died as well as one armed guard and sixteen crewmen. Photo Caption: the MS City of New York Hot books by Captain Hank Bracker available at Amazon.com “Salty & Saucy Maine,” is a coming of age book that recounts Captain Hank Bracker’s formative years. “Salty & Saucy Maine – Sea Stories from Castine” tells many sea stories of Captain Hank’s years at Maine Maritime Academy and certainly demonstrates that life should be lived to the fullest! In 2020 it became the most talked about book Down East! “The Exciting Story of Cuba -Understanding Cuba’s Present by Knowing Its Past” ISBN-13: 978 1484809457. This multi-award winning history of Cuba is written in an easy-to-read style. Follow in the footsteps of the heroes, beautiful movie stars and sinister villains, who influenced the course of a country that is much bigger than its size! This book is on the shelf as a reference book at the American Embassy in Havana and most American Military and Maritime Academies.

It took approximately seventy five years for the telephone to reach fifty million users, the radio thirty eight years, thirteen years for the television, four for the Internet, two for Facebook and only nineteen days, for Pokemon Go.

Drama Series’s carcass was unceremoniously carted away, by the usual contract hauler, to the dump where dead Brisbane horses routinely go. Her cause of death remained uncertain. Had she been bitten by a snake? Had she eaten some poisonous weeds out in that scrubby, derelict meadow? Those hypotheses crumbled abruptly, thirteen days later, when her stable mates began falling ill. They went down like dominoes. This wasn’t snakebite or toxic fodder. It was something contagious

1) “How did I end up down this rabbit hole of being obsessed with men on the DL (down-low)? Why did I prefer playing more in the straight arena with the closet cases (as they were called in my day) and the bisexual men over the gay ones?” 2) “We didn’t identify in my day; you were either gay, bisexual, or straight. People will always label others or pigeonhole them without even knowing for sure who they really are. They presumably stereotype and judge just by your outward appearance.” 3) “It wasn't until the seventh grade that Sister Gloria would be my social studies teacher, and I began leaning more towards being an extrovert than the anxious introvert that I was. All the accolades go to her. She lit the flame under my ass that would be the catalyst for my advocacy. Her podium, located front and center of the classroom, became ground zero for me and where I found my voice.” 4) “Their taunting was my kryptonite. My peers hated me for no other reason than the fact that they thought I was gay. I was only thirteen and often wondered how they knew who I was before I did.” 5) “Evangelical Christian Anita Bryant (First Lady of Religious Bigotry), along with her minions, led a crusade against the LGBTQ community back in 1977 and said we were trying to recruit children and that ‘Homosexuals are human garbage.’ My first thoughts were, how unchristian and deplorable of her to even say something like that, not to mention, to make it her life’s mission promoting hate.” 6) “Are there any more Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. kind of Christians in this country today? Dr. King knew about his friend’s homosexuality and arrest. Being a religious man and a pastor, Dr. King could have cast judgment and shunned Bayard Rustin like so many other religious leaders did at the time. But he didn’t. That, to me, is the true meaning of being a Christian. He loved Bayard unconditionally and was unbiased towards his sexual orientation. Dr. King was not a counterfeit Christian and practiced what he preached—and that, along with remembering what Jesus had said, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself,’ is the bottom line to Christianity and all faiths.” 7) “We are all God’s children! That is what I was taught in Catholic school. God doesn’t make mistakes—it’s as simple as that. Love is love—period! I don’t need anyone’s validation or approval, I define myself.” 8) “You will bake our cakes, you will provide us our due healthcare, you will do our joint tax returns, and yes, you will bless our unions, too. Otherwise, you cannot call yourselves Christians or even Americans, for that matter.” 9) “The torch has been passed. But we must never forget the LGBT pioneers that have come before and how they fought in the streets for our lives. Never forget the Stonewall riots of 1969 nor the social stigma put upon us during the HIV/AIDS epidemic from its onset in the early 1980s. Remember how many died alone because nobody cared. Finally, keep in mind how we were all pathologized and labeled in the medical books until 1973.

Dora and John come round after breakfast. They are our next door neighbours and we see them practically every day, especially in the summer holidays when we are all bored and hot. Dora is thirteen, just like Alice and Moz. Dora and Alice are best friends forever. It can get a bit much sometimes. But that's OK, because this summer I am mainly hanging out with Moz and John. Moz is my big brother and he's pretty cool. He is enjoying lazing around at home and in the garden, getting a tan. I think this is because he likes to take his t-shirt off all the time to show the girls his cool bod! He has got a lot taller suddenly this year and looks strong and athletic. But I think he's still a bit of a kid inside, wanting to hang out with me and John rather than try and talk to all the cool girls and not knowing what to say. The down-side is that as he's the eldest, he's always bossing us around. He ALWAYS thinks he knows best. John is eleven, like me. He's OK most of the time, but he can be very annoying too.

Dora and John come round after breakfast. They are our next door neighbours and we see them practically every day, especially in the summer holidays when we are all bored and hot. Dora is thirteen, just like Alice and Moz. Dora and Alice are best friends forever. It can get a bit much sometimes. But that's OK, because this summer I am mainly hanging out with Moz and John. Moz is my big brother and he's pretty cool. He is enjoying lazing around at home and in the garden, getting a tan. I think this is because he likes to take his t-shirt off all the time to show the girls his cool bod! He has got a lot taller suddenly this year and looks strong and athletic. But I think he's still a bit of a kid inside, wanting to hang out with me and John rather than try and talk to all the cool girls and not knowing what to say. The down-side is that as he's the eldest, he's always bossing us around. He ALWAYS thinks he knows best. John is eleven, like me. He's OK most of the time, but he can be very annoying too. He

I felt inclined to remind her of our early days together, teaching in a large junior school not many miles from this very hotel, when we thrived cheerfully on a salary of just over thirteen pounds a month, and visited the theatre, the cinema, went skating and dancing, dressed attractively and, best of all, were as merry as grigs all the time.