Trench Best Quotes

Sometimes he remembered having heard how soldiers under fire in the trenches, and having nothing to do, try hard to find some occupation the more easily to bear the danger. It seemed to Pierre that all men were like those soldiers, seeking refuge from life: some in ambition, some in cards, some in framing laws, some in women, some in playthings, some in horses, some in politics, some in sport, some in wine, and some in government service. 'Nothing is without consequence, and nothing is important: it's all the same in the end. The thing to do is to save myself from it all as best I can,' thought Pierre. Not to see IT, that terrible IT.

His hand was a claw, sharp enough to open her. She would be like all the others—Ruta Badowski, in her broken dancing shoes. Tommy Duffy, still with the dirt of his last baseball game under his nails. Gabriel Johnson, taken on the best day of his life. Or even Mary White, holding out for a future that never arrived. She’d be like all those beautiful, shining boys marching off to war, rifles at their hips and promises on their lips to their best girls that they’d be home in time for Christmas, the excitement of the game showing in their bright faces. They’d come home men, heroes with adventures to tell about, how they’d walloped the enemy and put the world right side up again, funneled it into neat lines of yes and no. Black and white. Right and wrong. Here and there. Us and them. Instead, they had died tangled in barbed wire in Flanders, hollowed by influenza along the Western Front, blown apart in no-man’s-land, writhing in trenches with those smiles still in place, courtesy of the phosgene, chlorine, or mustard gas. Some had come home shell-shocked and blinking, hands shaking, mumbling to themselves, following orders in some private war still taking place in their minds. Or, like James, they’d simply vanished, relegated to history books no one bothered to read, medals put in cupboards kept closed. Just a bunch of chess pieces moved about by unseen hands in a universe bored with itself.

Real arms races are run by highly intelligent, bespectacled engineers in glass offices thoughtfully designing shiny weapons on modern computers. But there's no thinking in the mud and cold of nature's trenches. At best, weapons thrown together amidst the explosions and confusion of smoky battlefields are tiny variations on old ones, held together by chewing gum. If they don't work, then something else is thrown at the enemy, including the kitchen sink - there's nothing "progressive" about that. At its usual worst, trench warfare is fought by attrition. If the enemy can be stopped or slowed by burning your own bridges and bombing your own radio towers and oil refineries, then away they go. Darwinian trench warfare does not lead to progress - it leads back to the Stone Age.

There is not a single loophole or curveball or open trench to fall into for the man or woman who walks the path that Christ walks. When He says, "Come, Follow Me" (Luke 18:22), He means that He knows where the quicksand is and where the thorns are and the best way to handle the slippery slope near the summit of our personal mountains. He knows it all, and He knows the way. He is the way.

Having now been in the trenches for five months, I had passed my prime. For the first three weeks, an officer was of little use in the front line... Between three weeks and four weeks he was at his best, unless he happened to have any particular bad shock or sequence of shocks. Then his usefulness gradually declined as neurasthenia developed. At six months he was still more or less all right; but by nine or ten months, unless he had been given a few weeks' rest on a technical course, or in hospital, he usually became a drag on the other company officers. After a year or fifteen months he was often worse than useless.

Thus we can see that the mechanics of war not only mean increased power but also make the highest demands on the men concerned. The best men will have the best machinery and the best bachinery will have the best men – for the two are inseparable.

Spring had come early that year, with warm quick rains and sudden frothing of pink peach blossoms and dogwood dappling with white stars the dark river swamp and far-off hills. Already the plowing was nearly finished, and the bloody glory of the sunset colored the fresh-cut furrows of red Georgia clay to even redder hues. The moist hungry earth, waiting upturned for the cotton seeds, showed pinkish on the sandy tops of furrows, vermilion and scarlet and maroon where shadows lay along the sides of the trenches. The whitewashed brick plantation house seemed an island set in a wild red sea, a sea of spiraling, curving, crescent billows petrified suddenly at the moment when the pink-tipped waves were breaking into surf. For here were no long, straight furrows, such as could be seen in the yellow clay fields of the flat middle Georgia country or in the lush black earth of the coastal plantations. The rolling foothill country of north Georgia was plowed in a million curves to keep the rich earth from washing down into the river bottoms. It was a savagely red land, blood-colored after rains, brick dust in droughts, the best cotton land in the world. It was a pleasant land of white houses, peaceful plowed fields and sluggish yellow rivers, but a land of contrasts, of brightest sun glare and densest shade. The plantation clearings and miles of cotton fields smiled up to a warm sun, placid, complacent. At their edges rose the virgin forests, dark and cool even in the hottest noons, mysterious, a little sinister, the soughing pines seeming to wait with an age-old patience, to threaten with soft sighs: "Be careful! Be careful! We had you once. We can take you back again.

Even the deepest point in the ocean is littered with trash: a grocery bag was recently seen drifting along the bottom of the Mariana Trench.

If you are trying to get momentum in marketing, business, marriage, your physical condition, or your parenting, take your best focused intensity over time and multiply it by God for unstoppable momentum.

The moment we give in, no machine in the world can help us. But as long as we do not lose the feeling that calls out to every valiant man, ’You are born to rule,’ we shall always know how to create the best instruments of power of our time.

The hardiest sons of the war, the men who lead the storm-troop, and manipulate the tank, the aeroplane, and the submarine, are preeminent in technical accomplishment; and it is these picked examples of dare-devil courage that represent the modern state i battle. These men of first-rate qualities with real blood in their veins, courageous, intelligent, accustomed to serve the machine, and yet its superior at the same time, are the men, too, who show up best in the trench and among the shell-holes.

This has been a book about people trying to solve problems created by people trying to solve problems. In the course of reporting it, I spoke to engineers and genetic engineers, biologists and microbiologists, atmospheric scientists and atmospheric entrepreneurs. Without exception, they were enthusiastic about their work. But, as a rule, this enthusiasm was tempered by doubt. The electric fish barriers, the concrete crevasse, the fake cavern, the synthetic clouds- these were presented to me less in a spirit of techno-optimism than what might be called techno-fatalism. They weren't improvements on the originals; they were the best that anyone could come up with, given the circumstances... It's in this context that interventions like assisted evolution and gene drives and digging millions of trenches to bury billions of trees have to be assessed. Geoengineering may be 'entirely crazy and quite disconcerting', but if it could slow the melting of the Greenland ice sheet, or take some of 'the pain and suffering away', or help prevent no-longer-fully-natural ecosystems from collapsing, doesn't it have to be considered?

Where is he?” Leo sat up, but his head felt like it was floating. They’d landed inside the compound. Something had happened on the way in—gunfire? “Seriously, Leo,” Jason said. “You could be hurt. You shouldn’t—” Leo pushed himself to his feet. Then he saw the wreckage. Festus must have dropped the big canary cages as he came over the fence, because they’d rolled in different directions and landed on their sides, perfectly undamaged. Festus hadn’t been so lucky. The dragon had disintegrated. His limbs were scattered across the lawn. His tail hung on the fence. The main section of his body had plowed a trench twenty feet wide and fifty feet long across the mansion’s yard before breaking apart. What remained of his hide was a charred, smoking pile of scraps. Only his neck and head were somewhat intact, resting across a row of frozen rosebushes like a pillow. “No,” Leo sobbed. He ran to the dragon’s head and stroked its snout. The dragon’s eyes flickered weakly. Oil leaked out of his ear. “You can’t go,” Leo pleaded. “You’re the best thing I ever fixed.” The dragon’s head whirred its gears, as if it were purring. Jason and Piper stood next to him, but Leo kept his eyes fixed on the dragon. He remembered what Hephaestus had said: That isn’t your fault, Leo. Nothing lasts forever, not even the best machines. His dad had been trying to warn him. “It’s not fair,” he said. The dragon clicked. Long creak. Two short clicks. Creak. Creak. Almost like a pattern…triggering an old memory in Leo’s mind. Leo realized Festus was trying to say something. He was using Morse code—just like Leo’s mom had taught him years ago. Leo

But Einstein was not the best mathematician around, and others, undeterred by neither the difficulty of the equations nor the war that was ravaging Europe (this was 1916), were able to find solutions. Some of the most important solutions ever found—those that describe the gravitational fields of stars and black holes—were written down by a German officer named Karl Schwarzchild as he lay dying in a field hospital of a skin disease he had picked up in the trenches.

When specialization becomes so narrow that an archaeologist digging in tropic Ecuador is deemed incompetent on archaeology in tropic Mexico, then the reverse must be also the case, and it seems apparent that specialists are not the best people to draw broad conclusions. Unfortunately, too few universities are so far prepared to educate students to become specialists in horizontal research, i.e., train them to acquire an academic ability to piece together the fragments that vertical research brings forth from its deep trenches.

They see it as perfectly normal for me to sit beside Victoria’s body for hours on end, telling her how much I love her and all the things I meant to inform her of but never got around to. How her grandfather Jack was a conscientious objector in the Second World War, but did not want to be separated from his mates, and so became an ambulance officer. How Grandma Sheila recalls him waking from a frequent dream of the trenches, always crying out, “I can’t reach him, I can’t reach him.” That he was a brave man who did the best he could within his own principles. Of how he would have loved her and been so proud of her. Asking Vic to tell Jack we miss him.

Your job as an EntreLeader is to make sure when your team member leaves your office they take their monkey with them. The first step is to give them some ideas for options and instruct them to come back with three good ways to solve the problem and a suggested course of action. The next step is to teach your team to come to your office with a problem only after they have found three or more possible solutions and a suggested course of action. That makes for some great discussions and teachable moments as you show them how you would make the call. After solving problems and making the call with your help several times, the best team members begin to see the pattern you use and can do what you do. The final step is very personally rewarding.

As in everything, nature is the best instructor, even as regards selection. One couldn't imagine a better activity on nature's part than that which consists in deciding the supremacy of one creature over another by means of a constant struggle. While we're on the subject, it's somewhat interesting to observe that our upper classes, who've never bothered about the hundreds of thousands of German emigrants or their poverty, give way to a feeling of compassion regarding the fate of the Jews whom we claim the right to expel. Our compatriots forget too easily that the Jews have accomplices all over the world, and that no beings have greater powers of resistance as regards adaptation to climate. Jews can prosper anywhere, even in Lapland and Siberia. All that love and sympathy, since our ruling class is capable of such sentiments, would by rights be applied exclusively—if that class were not corrupt—to the members of our national community. Here Christianity sets the example. What could be more fanatical, more exclusive and more intolerant than this religion which bases everything on the love of the one and only God whom it reveals? The affection that the German ruling class should devote to the good fellow-citizen who faithfully and courageously does his duty to the benefit of the community, why is it not just as fanatical, just as exclusive and just as intolerant? My attachment and sympathy belong in the first place to the front-line German soldier, who has had to overcome the rigours of the past winter. If there is a question of choosing men to rule us, it must not be forgotten that war is also a manifestation of life, that it is even life's most potent and most characteristic expression. Consequently, I consider that the only men suited to become rulers are those who have valiantly proved themselves in a war. In my eyes, firmness of character is more precious than any other quality. A well toughened character can be the characteristic of a man who, in other respects, is quite ignorant. In my view, the men who should be set at the head of an army are the toughest, bravest, boldest, and, above all, the most stubborn and hardest to wear down. The same men are also the best chosen for posts at the head of the State—otherwise the pen ends by rotting away what the sword has conquered. I shall go so far as to say that, in his own sphere, the statesman must be even more courageous than the soldier who leaps from his trench to face the enemy. There are cases, in fact, in which the courageous decision of a single statesman can save the lives of a great number of soldiers. That's why pessimism is a plague amongst statesmen. One should be able to weed out all the pessimists, so that at the decisive moment these men's knowledge may not inhibit their capacity for action. This last winter was a case in point. It supplied a test for the type of man who has extensive knowledge, for all the bookworms who become preoccupied by a situation's analogies, and are sensitive to the generally disastrous epilogue of the examples they invoke. Agreed, those who were capable of resisting the trend needed a hefty dose of optimism. One conclusion is inescapable: in times of crisis, the bookworms are too easily inclined to switch from the positive to the negative. They're waverers who find in public opinion additional encouragement for their wavering. By contrast, the courageous and energetic optimist—even although he has no wide knowledge— will always end, guided by his subconscious or by mere commonsense, in finding a way out.

more research with Richard,” Paul said, shaking off my weirdness. “He’s more likely to listen to me.” Actually, in my experience, Richard was less likely to listen to Paul and more likely to listen to himself telling Paul what to do. “I don’t think so,” I said. “I think there’s someone who could do it better.” Paul’s eyebrows, which had returned to their traditional position, rose. “Really.” “Yes. Liss, would you see if Maxie is up in your room, and if she is, ask her to come down here?” Melissa put her glass in the sink and walked toward the kitchen door. “I was going up to change anyway,” she said. She smiled privately. “One more day.” And she was gone. Paul regarded me carefully. “Maxie?” he asked. “Best possible solution. She’s not related to Richard, she has no feelings about him in any direction, and he’s seen that she’s good with research, so she’ll be asking him on a professional basis. The trick is going to be selling it to her.” Paul stayed very still for a moment, which I know is not easy for him to do; the ghosts are sort of ethereal, not really ever being solidly in one place or position. Then he held up a hand, palm out. “Very solid reasoning,” he said. Maxie, wearing the trench coat that indicated she had her laptop with her—nobody was getting that thing away from her now—dropped down through the ceiling and landed in the middle of the center island. I was just glad she hadn’t ended up in the middle of food. “Melissa says you were looking for me,” she said. The trench coat vanished, and sure enough

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So now here I am, bouncing along in a truck with concrete shocks surrounded by a Hellion legion that smells like a fish-market Dumpster. I’m not usually the dragged-along-for-the-ride type. Usually, I’m the one doing the dragging, but I’m a little out of my depth here. Like Marianas Trench out of my depth. I fought in the arena long enough to know that sometimes the best strategy is to shut up, go along with the game, and make sure that someone is standing in front of me when the tentacles hit the fan. So far though, all my Cool Hand Luke plan has gotten me is a numb ass from sitting and a ringing in my ears from the engine noise. Worst of all, the unicorn is starting to smell good.

boots right off his feet. There were stories of men sucked down into the muck never to be seen again. Victor didn’t know if the stories were true, but he did think it possible. The mud was everywhere. In their hair under their helmets, flavoring their food, between their toes in their boots, layering their canteens, permeating their very souls. They couldn’t get away from the mud. They slept in it, fought in it, lived in it. Died in it. Sometimes after a hard downpour a new body part appeared out of the mud. Victor told himself it didn’t matter. Whoever he was, the man was dead, gone from his body to meet his Maker. What was left was just bone, sinew, and skin. And if Victor was ordered over the top and got hit by enemy fire to end up one of those bodies sunk down in the mud, what difference would it make if the soldiers lucky enough to still be breathing used his hand sticking out of the side of the trench to hold something up out of the mud. That’s how they were using Oscar’s. Nobody really knew the dead man’s name or even his nationality, but it only seemed right to name him, to make him part of their company when his hand emerged from the side of the trench. That’s how war was. A man had to survive as best he could. He couldn’t worry about what he’d left back home. He couldn’t worry about how long he was going to live. A man just had to follow orders and give all he had to win the war and save democracy. War wasn’t a thing like Victor had expected or maybe anything like anybody back in the States had expected. Back there, they’d taught them to march. Wasn’t much use for marching in the trenches. It was just hunkering down and hoping a sharpshooter didn’t spot your helmet if you forgot and lifted your head a few inches too high. Or that your gas mask would work when the Germans launched their mustard gas barrages. Or that you wouldn’t get the order to go over the top. Up

thumb sideways, or three fingers, is the consensus threshold. Any option that has that level of support (or higher) from every person in the workshop is good to go. Everybody doesn’t have to like that option, but everyone will accept and support it. That’s what consensus means. This type of consensus voting usually reveals the best option quite clearly.

Nothing is more repulsive to me than the literary man who must immediately display every emotion and every experience to its best advantage and stick it on paper.

Study after study shows that employees leave organizations primarily because of poor relationships with managers, not because of pay, benefits, or other factors. How well you train, coach, empower, and support your people—and whether you show appreciation for the hard work they do each day in the trenches serving customers—makes all the difference not only in retaining your best employees, but also in creating memorable experiences for customers.

Lewis’s scant references to the horrors of trench warfare confirm both its objective realities (“the horribly smashed men still moving like half-crushed beetles, the sitting or standing corpses, the landscape of sheer earth without a blade of grass”) and his own subjective distancing of himself from this experience (it “shows rarely and faintly in memory” and is “cut off from the rest of my experience”).[156] This is perhaps the most distinctive feature of Lewis’s “treaty with reality”—the construction of a frontier, a barrier, which protected Lewis from such shocking images as “horribly smashed men,” and allowed him to continue his life as if these horrors had been experienced by someone else. Lewis spun a cocoon around himself, insulating his thoughts from rotting corpses and the technology of destruction. The world could be kept at bay—and this was best done by reading, and allowing the words and thoughts of others to shield him from what was going on around him. Lewis’s experience of this most technological and impersonal of wars was filtered and tempered through a literary prism. For Lewis, books were both a link to the remembered—if sentimentally exaggerated—bliss of a lost past and a balm for the trauma and hopelessness of the present. As he wrote to Arthur Greeves several months later, he looked back wistfully to happier days, in which he sat surrounded by his “little library and browsed from book to book.”[157] Those days, he reflected with obvious sadness, were gone.

I love to discuss WWI American Trench Watches. If you have a question about one of my books, a Waltham Trench Watch or an Elgin Trench Watch drop me a line through my web page at LRF Antique Watches. I'll do my best to get back with you quickly!

Bastogne Eliza buys a thimble Every time she goes to town She's mounted her collection On the fingers she has found The olive jeeps are hauling heaps Of guns & drums & gew-gaws As I pick my teeth With a splinter from the true cross If yer lost then you must be converted If yer at peace then you must be perverted Either way, you'll perish And be sent to Hell by carriage, Flayed until demented And then sent away again To haunt the craters And the trenches of Bastogne The winter wind is whistling Around Eliza fair The lice have left her head To find a warmer patch of hair The shutters are shaking And the fire is dwindling-- It's time we used Those thimble stands for kindling Eliza's in the pantry With her lamprey trapped in amber Her onanistic moaning Has a rather jarring timbre I'm beneath the covers In my Sunday best attire And I'm sucking on a Peacemaker pacifier

Leaders sometimes wonder why they or their organization fail to achieve success, never seem to reach their potential. It’s often because they don’t understand or can’t instill the concept of what a team is all about at its best: connection and extension. This is a fundamental ingredient of ongoing organizational achievement. (Of course, incompetence as a leader is also a common cause of organizational failure.) Combat soldiers talk about whom they will die for. Who is it? It’s those guys right next to them in the trench, not the fight song, the flag, or some general back at the Pentagon, but those guys who sacrifice and bleed right next to them. “I couldn’t let my buddies down,” is what all soldiers say. Somebody they had never seen before they joined the army or marines has become someone they would die for. That’s the ultimate connection and extension.

Here on the Eastern Front, whenever we carried out our low-level attacks immediately in front of our comrades on the ground – dropping our bombs singly on the gun emplacements and machine-gun nests that were holding up their advance, and then strafing the enemy’s trenches until our ammunition was exhausted – we could actually see the results. We saw our troops getting to their feet and dashing forwards, often waving up at us as they did so, to storm the Soviet lines that we had been attacking only moments earlier. That was it! Here we had finally come to understand what our close-support missions really meant to our comrades on the ground. Without our help, how much more blood would those troops have had to shed in order to achieve their objectives? We were needed here like we had never been needed before. This knowledge made us all the more determined to give of our best. It also made it that little bit easier to accept our inevitable losses.

The dream of every cell is to become two cells’ said François Jacob, the most lyrical revolutionary of molecular biology. No cell lives the dream so wholly or so senselessly as a cancer cell, turning dream to nightmare. Nothing else captures the myopic immediacy of natural selection so starkly. The moment is all that matters for selection: there is no foresight, no balance, no slowing at the prospect of doom. Just the best ploy for the moment, for me, right now, not for the many, and often mistaken. Cancer cells die in piles, necrotic flesh worse than the trenches. The decimated survivors mutate, evolve, adapt, exploit their shifting environment, selfish to the bitter end. Their horror is that they know no bounds. They will eat away at our flesh to fuel their pointless lives and deaths, until, if we are unlucky, they take us too. I am writing about cancer, but must confess that I have the pointless greed and destruction of humanity at the back of my mind. May we find it within ourselves to be better than cancer cells.

Your financial life is like a sandcastle. You spend time tending to it, building it, and making decisions and choices that you hope will keep it from crumbling. You can control what you can, but there are always things outside of your control—like whether or not, you have the right tools or someone to help you build, when the tide will change and when the waves will start to move in. Financial shocks and emergencies are the waves threatening your sandcastle. The thing about the tides—and emergencies is—they will always come. Sometimes very suddenly as if out of the blue, and sometimes gradually. When it does come in, hopefully you’ll have dug that trench or built that wall. In the same way a trench or a wall is the best defense in weathering the shock of a changing tide, an emergency fund is the first line of defense against a financial shock.

I'd never had an audience like Rebecca Cross. Her shining eyes and respectful silence spurred me to ever greater heights of invention. Ever deeper trenches of imagined horrors. By Friday, I'd pegged half our class as speeding towards some kind of astonishing doom. And Becca was mine. We'd been written off as weirdos together. Together. Some girls treated their friends as athletes in competitive trials, constantly moving them up and down the ranks. But for us best friendship was deadly serious. More permanent than a tattoo. We invented code words and handshakes. We made repeated blood pacts. We scratched each other's arms with pine needles and sipped unholy potions we invented in our parents' gardens out of some nebulous, but passionate desire to show out devotion. We snuck clothes into each other's drawers, so we could swear to anyone who asked (no-one ever asked) that we lived together. Our mom's conducted hush phone calls, worried we'd burn bright then break each others hearts. They set up play dates with other children who never asked to come back. Our parents didn't get it. That was all. They didn't believe you could find your soulmate at six.

Judge Appleton White criticized the New England elite for not helping these new immigrants. He thought we should be educating them. These immigrants, like any new wave of immigrants, I believe, represent the values of hard work and self-reliance that founded this country. From White’s memoir, I made the connection in my lecture to the scapegoating that Latin American immigrants face today. This is an old, cyclical story in which people make it here and then they decide to close the doors behind them. The story is repeated whether you’re English, Irish, Jewish, or Latin American immigrants. But these new immigrants, whoever they are, should remind those already here, what it took to make it in America, what desire burned in these immigrants to never give up, and what kind of hope these newcomers had, despite the dangers. These are the best American values. I wanted to write about the new pilgrims of this country — nobody’s children. These people—like Turi, Molly, and Arnulfo—who represent the best values of this country. The values of trying to make it on your own. The values of fighting for your place. The values of helping each other. These are the basic values that started this country and served as its foundation. But too often we have forgotten them, and where these values came from. And this working to become American, to find your place, instead of assuming your privileged place, this is Aristotle through and through. For Aristotle, you need to work and to act to find meaning in the idea of the good. An American who is growing fat and happy in Dallas, or anywhere else, will not have that practical, in-the-trenches Aristotelian understanding of what it takes to belong after a long struggle, like a new immigrant.

Sometimes the people you had early on—maybe even the people who have been with you since the beginning—simply don’t have the runway to help you scale in zeros. It’s because they’re not just employees at this point; these are your friends. You’ve been through the trenches together. You have to be brutally honest with yourself and ask these two questions: “Is everyone up for the challenge to scale?” and “Are they capable of scaling in zeros?” If not, there has to be a willingness to make painful changes and say, “We have to bring someone else in.” They may change their role in the company or exit early, so in these cases, I do my best to ensure that these employees continue to be advisors and maintain some stock ownership in the company.

He could also take whatever you felt best about and sculpt it into a flaw with a handful of words. A terrible gift if ever there was one. Slaps wear off; bruises fade. But withheld love leaves a trench of invisible scars.

There is an old story about a general who went on an inspection tour of the front during World War I, and, putting his head incautiously up out of a trench, was narrowly missed by a sniper's bullet. He turned to a nearby sergeant and bellowed: "Get that sniper!" "Oh, we've got him spotted, sir," the sergeant said. "He's been there for six days now." "Well, then," the general said, "why don't you blast him out of there?" "Well, sir, it's this way," the sergeant explained. "He's fired about sixty rounds since he's been out there, and he hasn't hit anything yet. We're afraid if we get rid of him they'll put up somebody who can shoot.

You all know, I fought hard in the trenches for what was best for this country. I watched men die in war, and I nearly got killed myself. One of the lessons I took from serving was that life is not guaranteed, and therefore we should live life to the fullest. I will not let my American dream die, and I deserve to be compensated for my service to this country, no matter who won. I made great sacrifices, and now this is a sacrifice that this county, this land, owes me in return.

Building an emergency fund is perhaps the single best investment available. The first $1000 to $2000 in the bank results in a state of mind unavailable to the guy who has bad debt and lacks emergency funds. The person with a small cash cushion gets to sleep at night, knowing they can afford next month’s rent and their next meal.

…but leaving the MiGs in the path of the two Phoenix missiles. Boom-boom! The MiGs exploded and the X-15 continued its wide circle until it was back in the trench of the Canal, back on its southeasterly course. However, its wide circle—easily two hundred kilometers wide—had allowed one of the African planes to loose a last-ditch missile, its finest: a single stolen American AIM-120 AMRAAM, the best air-to-air missile in the world.

Elara, joining them on the tower, muttered an old protective chant under her breath. "We've faced many threats before, but never one of this magnitude. That Necromancer... he's the key. We need to find a way to break his control." Mira's fingers instinctively strummed a soft, defiant melody on her lute. "I'll try to summon the spirits again. With their aid, we might have a chance." Eldon nodded. "Our defenses will slow the horde, but we can't hold out indefinitely. Our best shot is a focused strike against the Necromancer." As the undead drew nearer, the villagers' defenses were put to the test. Trenches filled with flammable oil were ignited, creating walls of fire that kept the zombies at bay, if only temporarily. Archers, positioned on rooftops, sent a barrage of arrows into the advancing mass, taking down dozens. But despite their efforts, the sheer number of undead proved overwhelming. Zombies began

A stable and prosperous Germany, he believed, was the best guarantor of a lasting peace.

And I still like you, damn you. You don’t shake one of us, you don’t fling our liking away because your man'chi says otherwise, you can’t get rid of us when we like you, Banichi, you’re stuck with me, so make the best of it.” There wasn’t a clear translation for like. It meant a preference for salad greens or iced drinks. But love was worse. Banichi would never forgive him that. […] Breath failed him. Self-control did. He flung it all out. “Banichi, I’d walk a thousand miles to have a kind word from you. I’d give you the shirt from my back if you needed it; if you were in trouble, I’d carry you that thousand miles. What do you call that? Foolish?” […]“That would be very difficult for you.” “So is liking atevi.” That got out before he censored it. […] “Don’t joke.” “I’m not joking. God, I’m not joking. We have to like somebody, we’re bound to like somebody, or we die, Banich, we outright die. Like, like, like–get off the damned word, Banichi. I cross that trench every day. Can’t you cross it once? Can’t you cross to where I am, just once, to know what I think?

They dined that night on champagne and lobster, despite widespread hunger in the capital. Overall, it was best to ignore the war as far as possible on such occasions. This was the tacit social convention. So instead of the trenches and troops, one talked of art and travels and scandal.

We had both lost whatever pretensions we'd clung to during the long years of the war. We'd both witnessed the best and worst of man. We'd both roughed it, sleeping in such lowly hovels as trench dugouts and barns. Perhaps it was in these unassuming spaces that we were truly ourselves.

The Soul-Hole (Note: icons in TSH do not necessarily match with formal meanings, they are decorative. There are multiple interprets–like the proverphorical layer cake. Enjoy the cuisine. Once dedicated to they who wish to stuff their pie holes on a diet of fattening sweet nothings). The Soul–Hole It was a soul It had a goal— (It had a notion–to fill its whole) Its desire was—to fill its hle It “dug” wholeheartedly its soul hole 5 To fill its soul and solely occupy the whole It tried all things to feed its hole— All sort O’ wants stuffed it–its black h●le The more it ❽ the more it famished— Ate its soul—all the more ravished 10 It thought it best Take More not less— Spaded it in–the meaningless Every shovel made Its hle got deep twice laid— 15 Struck it poor it did–its dirt well paid ◷ne scoop forward tw◑ depths deep Length doubles t◒◒—its emptying sØul–it keeps On the w(h)◎le, it went whole hog, To burrow its hole–this groundhog went agog— Furrowed it deep—to slop its façade The more it strode to trench its hole— A thimbleful empty⨟ no (front) end load (–Pssst! Its as if it got bit by a pire of soul— Yea, a soulpire sucked its swhoule dry— 25 Leaving 2wö more empty holes) It filled but missed It labored in bliss Found it it—it abyssed In dread and fearh it stoked its hole 30 With joyous tear it looped its knot whole Broke its soil with useless toil All–to–make it—it–assoiled Other: “do it have a h ◙ le in its •ead?—? It needs to fill its head h⌻le–like a hole in its head (—Fill ⎌ its h

In a data-driven world, that means making sure that everyone understands the objective, the data collected, the metrics, and how the primary decision maker is interpreting the evidence. Give others a chance to put forward their interpretations and views, if those differ, and get everyone on board; but also get inputs on other perspectives that that the decision maker may have missed. To help, you can remember this neat mnemonic, DECIDE: Define the problem. Establish the criteria. Consider all the alternatives. Identify the best alternative. Develop and implement a plan of action. Evaluate and monitor the solution and feedback when necessary. In other words, make sure that stakeholders are on board with each of these steps.

The Soul-Hole (Note: The icons in TSH do not necessarily match with their intended formal meanings, they are merely frosting. Also, there are no footnotes to explain the text as there are multiple interpretations–like the proverphorical layer cake. Enjoy the cuisine. If it gets tedious its meant to. (Once dedicated to certains who want to stuff their pie holes on a diet of fattening sweet nothings). The Soul–Hole It was a soul It had a goal— (It had a notion–to fill its whole) Its desire was—to fill its hle It “dug” wholeheartedly its soul hole 5 To fill its soul and solely occupy the whole It tried all things to feed its hole— All sort O’ wants stuffed it–its black h●le The more it ❽ the more it famished— Ate its soul—all the more ravished 10 It thought it best Take More not less— Spaded it in–the meaningless Every shovel made Its hle got deep twice laid— 15 Struck it poor it did–its dirt well paid ◷ne scoop forward tw◑ depths deep Length doubles t◒◒—its emptying sØul–it keeps On the w(h)◎le, it went whole hog, To burrow its hole–this groundhog went agog— Furrowed it deep—to slop its façade The more it strode to trench its hole— A thimbleful empty⨟ no (front) end load (–Pssst! Its as if it got bit by a pire of soul— Yea, a soulpire sucked its swhoule dry— 25 Leaving 2wö more empty holes) It filled but missed It labored in bliss Found it it—it abyssed In dread and fearh it stoked its hole 30 With joyous tear it looped its knot whole Broke its soil with useless toil All–to–make it—it–assoiled Other: “do it have a h ◙ le in its •ead?—? It needs to fill its head h⌻le–like a hole in its head (—Fill ⎌ its h