Tripod Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Tripod. Here they are! All 100 of them:

And the life of the ebony clock went out with that of the last of the gay. And the flames of the tripods expired. And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.
Edgar Allan Poe (The Masque of the Red Death)
Thanks, tripod," Eric said.... "Tripod?" Jace asked. "As hung as you are, you practically have three legs.
Olivia Cunning (Hot Ticket (Sinners on Tour, #3))
We drove 22 miles into the country around Farmington. There were meadows and apple orchards. White fences trailed through the rolling fields. Soon the sign started appearing. THE MOST PHOTOGRAPHED BARN IN AMERICA. We counted five signs before we reached the site. There were 40 cars and a tour bus in the makeshift lot. We walked along a cowpath to the slightly elevated spot set aside for viewing and photographing. All the people had cameras; some had tripods, telephoto lenses, filter kits. A man in a booth sold postcards and slides -- pictures of the barn taken from the elevated spot. We stood near a grove of trees and watched the photographers. Murray maintained a prolonged silence, occasionally scrawling some notes in a little book. "No one sees the barn," he said finally. A long silence followed. "Once you've seen the signs about the barn, it becomes impossible to see the barn." He fell silent once more. People with cameras left the elevated site, replaced by others. We're not here to capture an image, we're here to maintain one. Every photograph reinforces the aura. Can you feel it, Jack? An accumulation of nameless energies." There was an extended silence. The man in the booth sold postcards and slides. "Being here is a kind of spiritual surrender. We see only what the others see. The thousands who were here in the past, those who will come in the future. We've agreed to be part of a collective perception. It literally colors our vision. A religious experience in a way, like all tourism." Another silence ensued. "They are taking pictures of taking pictures," he said.
Don DeLillo (White Noise)
The secret of success in battle lies often not so much in the use of one's own strength but in the exploitation of the other side's weaknesses.
John Christopher (When the Tripods Came)
But my heart is always propped up in a field on its tripod, ready for the next arrow.
Billy Collins (Aimless Love: New and Selected Poems)
And now was acknowledged the presence of the Red Death. He had come like a thief in the night. And one by one dropped the revelers in the blood-bedewed halls of their revel, and died each in the despairing posture of his fall. And the life of the ebony clock went out with that of the last of the gay. And the flames of the tripods expired. And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.
Edgar Allan Poe
Huge mammals surrounded us, any one of whom could easily overturn our stupid little boat. Tripod would drown. I would drown. Joe would undoubtedly be rescued by mermaids seduced by his beauty.
Kristan Higgins
Have a drink, and try to relax. All right, have another drink. There are times when getting drunk's not a bad idea.
John Christopher (When the Tripods Came)
I say no wealth is worth my life! Not all they claim was stored in the depths of Troy, that city built on riches, in the old days of peace before the sons of Achaea came- not all the gold held fast in the Archer's rocky vaults, in Phoebus Apollo's house on Pytho's sheer cliffs! Cattle and fat sheep can all be had for the raiding, tripods all for the trading, and tawny-headed stallions. But a man's life breath cannot come back again- no raiders in force, no trading brings it back, once it slips through a man's clenched teeth. Mother tells me, the immortal goddess Thetis with her glistening feet, that two fates bear me on to the day of death. If I hold out here and I lay siege to Troy, my journey home is gone, but my glory never dies. If I voyage back to the fatherland I love, my pride, my glory dies... true, but the life that's left me will be long, the stroke of death will not come on me quickly.
Homer (The Iliad)
Cattle and fat sheep can all be had for the raiding, tripods for the trading, and tawny headed stallions. But a mans's lifebreath cannot come back again- no raiders in force, no trading brings it back, once it slips through a man's clenched teeth.
Homer (The Iliad)
In politics, the tripod is the most unstable of all structures.
Frank Herbert (Dune (Dune, #1))
I am a leg of the death tripod that will destroy our foes.
Frank Herbert (Dune (Dune, #1))
As Pa said, censorship encouraged people to believe nonsense.
John Christopher (When the Tripods Came)
There are times when thinking about something is the worst possible policy.
John Christopher (When the Tripods Came)
He felt so lost, he said later, that the familiar studio felt like a haunted valley deep in the mountains, with the smell of rotting leaves, the spray of a waterfall, the sour fumes of fruit stashed away by a monkey; even the dim glow of the master's oil lamp on its tripod looked to him like misty moonlight in the hills.
Ryūnosuke Akutagawa (Hell Screen)
Lee threw down the tripod, and Trip dropped the FN MAG machine gun onto it...Lee hunkered down behind the big weapon. Holly handed me an RPG. The heavy tube was reassuring in my hands. Everyone dug down into the ditch, prepared to fight. Nervous but competent. Scared but professional. We were ready to put some smack down. Not bad for an accountant, a librarian, a schoolteacher, and a stripper.
Larry Correia (Monster Hunter International (Monster Hunter International, #1))
You have to understand – there is a romance to Africa. You can see a sunset and believe you have witnessed the hand of God. You watch the slow lope of a lioness and forget to breathe. You marvel at the tripod of a giraffe bent to water. In Africa, there are iridescent blues on the wings of birds that you do not see anywhere else in nature. In Africa, in the midday heat, you can see blisters in the atmosphere. When you are in Africa, you feel primordial, rocked in the cradle of the world.
Jodi Picoult (Leaving Time)
Yeah, well,” I say, “I thought about taking a video of myself giving you a lap dance, but I don’t have anything to mount your phone on, so this was the next best thing.” “I will happily go back into the woods, find some sticks, and build you a tripod, Daphne,” he says.
Emily Henry (Funny Story)
But the tripod upon which Eternity swings is composed of flesh and thought and emotion.
Frank Herbert (God Emperor of Dune (Dune, #4))
And a leader has to command confidence, and consent.
John Christopher (When the Tripods Came)
Nellie Fuller was racing down the stairs as we returned to the hallway, nearly tripping over her tripod in her haste. "I heard a noise," she said. "Have I already missed all of the excitement?" "Nothing of consequence," answered Jackaby. "Stay indoors, however, unless you're enthusiastic about the prospect of being eviscerated.
William Ritter (Beastly Bones (Jackaby, #2))
Let us trust to ourselves, see all with our own eyes; Let these be our oracles, our tripods and our gods.
Will Durant (The Story of Philosophy)
From time to time, Musk will send out an e-mail to the entire company to enforce a new policy or let them know about something that’s bothering him. One of the more famous e-mails arrived in May 2010 with the subject line: Acronyms Seriously Suck: There is a creeping tendency to use made up acronyms at SpaceX. Excessive use of made up acronyms is a significant impediment to communication and keeping communication good as we grow is incredibly important. Individually, a few acronyms here and there may not seem so bad, but if a thousand people are making these up, over time the result will be a huge glossary that we have to issue to new employees. No one can actually remember all these acronyms and people don’t want to seem dumb in a meeting, so they just sit there in ignorance. This is particularly tough on new employees. That needs to stop immediately or I will take drastic action—I have given enough warnings over the years. Unless an acronym is approved by me, it should not enter the SpaceX glossary. If there is an existing acronym that cannot reasonably be justified, it should be eliminated, as I have requested in the past. For example, there should be no “HTS” [horizontal test stand] or “VTS” [vertical test stand] designations for test stands. Those are particularly dumb, as they contain unnecessary words. A “stand” at our test site is obviously a *test* stand. VTS-3 is four syllables compared with “Tripod,” which is two, so the bloody acronym version actually takes longer to say than the name! The key test for an acronym is to ask whether it helps or hurts communication. An acronym that most engineers outside of SpaceX already know, such as GUI, is fine to use. It is also ok to make up a few acronyms/contractions every now and again, assuming I have approved them, eg MVac and M9 instead of Merlin 1C-Vacuum or Merlin 1C-Sea Level, but those need to be kept to a minimum.
Ashlee Vance (Elon Musk: Inventing the Future)
The hardest part is setting the camera on the tripod, or making the decision to bring the camera out of the car, or just raising the camera to your face, believing, by those actions, that whatever you find before you, whatever you find there, is going to be good.
Sally Mann
If one is seeking reasons for disloyalty, it is useful to find something one can resent.
John Christopher (The White Mountains (The Tripods, #1))
Trust to yourself; let our own eyes determine; Be they our tripods, oracles, and gods.
Voltaire (Oedipe de Corneille et Oedipe de Voltaire)
The Stoic philosopher and playwright Seneca is said to have owned five hundred tripod tables with ivory legs—no small irony, since he was a vocal critic of the empire's extravagances.
William J. Bernstein (A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped the World)
And one by one dropped the revelers in the blood-bedewed halls of their revel, and died each in the despairing posture of his fall. And the life of the ebony clock went out with that of the last of the gay. And the flames of the tripods expired. And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.
Edgar Allan Poe (The Masque of the Red Death)
Young children have no past. The old have no future. The rest are too busy with present. This time-tripod holds up the world. You ignore the importance of this interdependence of the three, the world as you know it is in danger of collapsing
R.N. Prasher
There is only one condition in which we can imagine managers not needing subordinates, and masters not needing slaves. This condition would be that each instrument could do its own work, at the word of command or by intelligent anticipation, like the statues of Daedalus or the tripods made by Hephaestus, of which Homer relates that "Of their own motion they entered the conclave of Gods on Olympus", as if a shuttle should weave of itself, and a plectrum should do its own harp playing.
Aristotle
What I was suddenly aware of was the importance of their being whatever each of them was--cocky and contemptuous, or bothered and beaten--as long as it was something they'd come to in their own way: the importance of being human, in fact. The peace and harmony Uncle Ian and the others claimed to be handing out in fact was death, because without being yourself, an individual, you weren't really alive.
John Christopher (When the Tripods Came)
Anachronism is not the inconsequential juxtaposition of epochs, but rather their inter-penetration, like the telescoping legs of a tripod, a series of tapering structures. Since it's quite far from one end to the other they can be opened out like an accordion; but they can also be stacked inside one another like Russian dolls, where the walls around time periods are extremely close to one another. The people of other centuries hear our phonographs blaring, and through the walls of time we see them raising their hands towards the deliciously prepared meal.
Elisabeth Lenk
I dreamed of setting it up out here in front of where I am sitting now, on the tripod that I would have ordered too, and starting, taking my time, to focus on a curling line of water, a piece of the world indifferent to the fact that there is language, that there are names to describe things, and grammar and verbs. My eye, solitary, filled with its own history, is desperate to evade, erase, forget; it is watching now, watching fiercely, like a scientist looking for a cure, deciding for some days to forget about words, to know at last that the words for colours, the blue-grey-green of the sea, the whiteness of the waves, will not work against thefullness of watching the rich chaos they yield and carry.
Colm Tóibín (The Empty Family)
I wanted to ask which war---the Boer or the Crimean? It was amazing how old people could talk about The War, as though that meant something.
John Christopher (When the Tripods Came)
In politics, the tripod is he most unstable of all structures. It's be bad enough without the complication of a feudal trade culture which turns its back on most science.
Frank Herbert (Dune (Dune, #1))
It’s a happy balance between the three legs of a tripod: the quality of the founders, the market opportunity, and the distinctiveness of the product.
David M. Rubensten (How to Invest: Masters on the Craft)
I lost something that was essential to me, and that no longer is. I no longer need it, as if I’d lost a third leg that up till then made it impossible for me to walk but that turned me into a stable tripod. I lost that third leg. And I went back to being a person I never was. I went back to having something I never had: just two legs. I know I can only walk with two legs. But I feel the useless absence of that third leg and it scares me, it was the leg that made me something findable by myself, and without even having to look for myself.
Clarice Lispector (The Passion According to G.H.)
collect   As many tripods as you think you’ll need,   Together with the other kinds of vessels   That the rites of sacrifice require: cauldrons,   Shallow basins, bowls; pour tall jugs full 8860 Of purest water from the sacred spring;   Have ready wood that’s dry and quick to catch;   And finally, be sure a sharp knife’s there.   All else I leave to you.” Those
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (Faust: A Tragedy, Parts One and Two)
Using three battens from Kirit’s wing, Djonn and Ceetcee built a tripod over the fire and suspended a small bone trivet beneath. I placed the eggs in the trivet, and we waited hungrily.
Fran Wilde (Cloudbound (Bone Universe, #2))
Cattle and fat sheep are things to be had for the lifting, and tripods can be won, and the tawny high heads of horses, but a man’s life cannot come back again, it cannot be lifted Nor captured again by force, once it has crossed the teeth’s barrier.
Adam Nicolson (Why Homer Matters: A History)
Nor mourn, O living One, because her part in life was mourning: Would she have lost the poet’s fire for the anguish of the burning? The minstrel harp, for the strained string? tripod for the afflated Woe, or the vision, for those tears in which it shone dilated?
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Walking back across the St-Esprit bridge, to the ghetto I'd instinctively gravitated toward, I mentally erected a more appropriate statue on the square. It would depict an unknown Sephardic Jew, kneeling over a stone tripod covered with crushed cacao beans destined for a cup of chocolate for one of the gentiles of Bayonne. It would be a symbolic piece, executed in smooth, chocolate-hued marble, and dedicated to all the other forgotten heroes--coffee-drinking Sufi dervishes, peyote-eating Native Americans, Mexican hemp-smokers--who, throughout history, have faced the wrath of all the sultans, drug czars, and Vatican clerics who have resorted to any spurious pretext to squelch one of the most venerable and misunderstood of human drives: the desire to escape, however briefly, everyday consciousness.
Taras Grescoe (The Devil's Picnic)
After the New Deal, economists began referring to America’s retirement-finance model as a “three-legged stool.” This sturdy tripod was composed of Social Security, private pensions, and combined investments and savings. In recent years, of course, two of those legs have been kicked out. Many Americans saw their assets destroyed by the Great Recession; even before the economic collapse, many had been saving less and less. And since the 1980s, employers have been replacing defined-benefit pensions that are funded by employers and guarantee a monthly sum in perpetuity with 401(k) plans, which often rely on employee contributions and can run dry before death. Marketed as instruments of financial liberation that would allow workers to make their own investment choices, 401(k)s were part of a larger cultural drift in America away from shared responsibilities toward a more precarious individualism. Translation: 401(k)s are vastly cheaper for companies than pension plans. “Over the last generation, we have witnessed a massive transfer of economic risk from broad structures of insurance, including those sponsored by the corporate sector as well as by government, onto the fragile balance sheets of American families,” Yale political scientist Jacob S. Hacker writes in his book The Great Risk Shift. The overarching message: “You are on your own.
Jessica Bruder (Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century)
And one by one dropped the revelers in the blood-bedewed halls of their revel, and died each in the despairing posture of his fall. And the life of the ebony clock went out with that of the last of the gay. and the flames of the tripod expired. and Darkness and Decay and the Red Death
Shirley Jackson (The Haunting of Hill House)
ASTROLOGER. Greet reverentially this star-blest hour!   Let magic loose the tyranny of Reason   And Fantasy, fetched from afar, display her power, 6620 For it belongs to her, this great occasion.   What all here boldly asked to see, now see it!   A thing impossible—therefore believe it.   [Faust mounts the proscenium from the other side.]   In priestly robes, head wreathed, the wonder-working man   Now confidently consummates what he began.   A tripod from the depths accompanied his ascent,   Incense is burning in the bowl, I smell the scent,   Next comes the invocation, all’s prepared;
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (Faust: A Tragedy, Parts One and Two)
The mindsight tripod. Openness, objectivity, and observation are the three processes that stabilize the mindsight lens in order to see and shape the inner world with clarity, depth, and power. With openness, we accept things as they are; with objectivity, we realize that what we are aware of is just one element of our experience and not the totality of our identity; with observation, we have a sense of ourselves as observers witnessing the unfolding of experience as it emerges moment by moment. Copyright © 2010 by Mind Your Brain, Inc. Used with permission by Daniel J. Siegel, M.D., from Mindsight: The New Science of Personal Transformation (2010).
Daniel J. Siegel (Pocket Guide to Interpersonal Neurobiology: An Integrative Handbook of the Mind (Norton Series on Interpersonal Neurobiology))
In old Norse times, the thrones of the sea-loving Danish kings were fabricated, saith tradition, of the tusks of the narwhale. How could one look at Ahab then, seated on that tripod of bones, without bethinking him of the royalty it symbolized? For a Khan of the plank, and a king of the sea and a great lord of Leviathans was Ahab.
Herman Melville (Moby Dick: or, the White Whale)
You have to understand—there is a romance to Africa. You can see a sunset and believe you have witnessed the hand of God. You watch the slow lope of a lioness and forget to breathe. You marvel at the tripod of a giraffe bent to water. In Africa, there are iridescent blues on the wings of birds that you do not see anywhere else in nature.
Jodi Picoult (Leaving Time)
She climbed down the cliffs after tying her sweater loosely around her waist. Down below she could see nothing but jagged rocks and waves. She was creful, but I watched her feet more than the view she saw- I worried about her slipping. My mother's desire to reach those waves, touch her feet to another ocean on the other side of the country, was all she was thinking of- the pure baptismal goal of it. Whoosh and you can start over again. Or was life more like the horrible game in gym that has you running from one side of an enclosed space to another, picking up and setting down wooden blocks without end? She was thinking reach the waves, the waves, the waves, and I was watching her navigate the rocks, and when we heard her we did so together- looking up in shock. It was a baby on the beach. In among the rocks was a sandy cove, my mother now saw, and crawling across the sand on a blanket was a baby in knitted pink cap and singlet and boots. She was alone on the blanket with a stuffed white toy- my mother thought a lamb. With their backs to my mother as she descended were a group of adults-very official and frantic-looking- wearing black and navy with cool slants to their hats and boots. Then my wildlife photographer's eye saw the tripods and silver circles rimmed by wire, which, when a young man moved them left or right, bounced light off or on the baby on her blanket. My mother started laughing, but only one assistant turned to notice her up among the rocks; everyone else was too busy. This was an ad for something. I imagined, but what? New fresh infant girls to replace your own? As my mother laughed and I watched her face light up, I also saw it fall into strange lines. She saw the waves behind the girl child and how both beautiful and intoxicating they were- they could sweep up so softly and remove this gril from the beach. All the stylish people could chase after her, but she would drown in a moment- no one, not even a mother who had every nerve attuned to anticipate disaster, could have saved her if the waves leapt up, if life went on as usual and freak accidents peppered a calm shore.
Alice Sebold (The Lovely Bones)
I hadn't realized that misery maybe got worse the older you were.
John Christopher (When the Tripods Came)
...nothing was of value, without a mind that challenged and inquired.
John Christopher (The White Mountains (The Tripods, #1))
Because without being yourself, an individual, you weren’t really alive.
John Christopher (When the Tripods Came)
Their perfume a ghost of summers long ago.
John Christopher (The White Mountains (The Tripods, #1))
What value did courage have, without a free and challenging mind to direct it?
John Christopher (The White Mountains (The Tripods, #1))
For nothing, as I now see it, equals the value of life - not the wealth they say prosperous Ilium possessed in earlier days, when there was peace, before the coming of the Greeks, nor all the treasure pilled up behind the stone threshold of Phoebus Apollo in rocky Delphi. Cattle and fat sheep can be lifted. Tripods and chestnut horses can be procured. But you cannot lift or procure a man's life, when once the breath has left his lips.
Homer (Homer's Iliad: Books Ix., Xviii., With Notes, and a Paper, by G.B. Wheeler)
The myth is tenderly parodied in a 1928 silent film, The Cameraman, which has an inept dreamy Buster Keaton vainly struggling with his dilapidated apparatus, knocking out windows and doors whenever he picks up his tripod, never managing to take one decent picture, yet finally getting some great footage (a photojournalist scoop of a tong war in New York’s Chinatown)—by inadvertence. It is the hero’s pet monkey who loads the camera with film and operates it part of the time.
Susan Sontag (On Photography)
Just as the last body catches fire, I signal Michael to start recording through the glass. He presses play, and the camera slowly begins to rotate on the tripod, while Michael and I make our way out of the building.  The camera will spin in circles, broadcasting fifteen men burning alive on the dark web. There for all the traffickers’ and pedophilic assholes’ viewing pleasure. And there for Claire’s viewing pleasure as well. The bitch is going to burn, too. Mark my fucking words.
H.D. Carlton (Hunting Adeline (Cat and Mouse, #2))
From out of the shadows, the British agent swung the yellow-and-black pole of a work light rig like a two-handed sword, striking the gunman squarely in the chest with the cluster of lamps at the upper end. Glass and plastic shattered against him, hardened halogen bulbs popping and sparking, disconnected power cables snapping through the air like whips. The gunman staggered backward, his balance failing, and Marc swung back the other way, this time catching the assassin across the face with the splayed metal legs of the work light tripod
James Swallow (Nomad (Marc Dane, #1))
He saw a chamber, broad and low, designed, in its every rich stain of picture and slumberous hanging, to appeal to the sensuous. And here the scent was thick and motionless. Costly marqueterie; Palissy candlesticks reflected in half-concealed mirrors framed in embossed silver; antique Nankin vases brimming with pot-pourri; in one comer a suit of Milanese armour, fluted, damasquinee, by Felippo Negroli; in another a tripod table of porphyry, spectrally repeating in its polished surface the opal hues of a vessel of old Venetian glass half filled with some topaz-coloured liqueur - such and many more tokens of a luxurious aestheticism wrought in the observer an immediate sense of pleasurable enervation. He noticed, with a swaying thrill of delight, that his feet were on a padded rug of Astrakhan - one of many, disposed eccentrically about the yellow tassellated-marble floor; and he noticed that the sole light in the chamber came from an iridescent globed lamp, fed with some fragrant oil, that hung near an alcove traversed by a veil of dark violet silk. ("The Accursed Cordonnier")
Bernard Capes (Gaslit Nightmares: Stories by Robert W. Chambers, Charles Dickens, Richard Marsh, and Others)
It is the inattentive reader who loses my subject, not I. Some word about it will always be found off in a corner, which will not fail to be sufficient, though it takes little room. I seek out change indiscriminately and tumultuously. My style and my mine alike go roaming. A man must be a little mad if he does not want to be even more stupid, say the precepts of our masters, and even more so their examples. A thousand poets drag and languish prosaically; but the best ancient prose — and I scatter it here indiscriminately as verse — shines throughout with the vigor and boldness of poetry, and gives the effect of its frenzy. To poetry we must certainly concede mastery and preeminence in speech. The poet, says Plato, seated on the tripod of the Muses, pours out in a frenzy whatever comes into his mouth, like the spout of a fountain, without ruminating and weighing it; and from him escape things of different colors and contradictory substance in an intermittent flow. He himself is utterly poetic, and the old theology is poetry, the scholars say, and the first philosophy. It is the original language of the Gods.
Michel de Montaigne
Our king Apollo, O child of mighty Zeus, when you were born your father gave you a gold headband and a lyre of tortoise shell, and more: a chariot drawn by swans. You were to go to Delphi and the Kastalian springs whose waters are the gift of broad Kephissos, and there deliver justice to the Hellenes through the oracles. But when you seized the reins, you made the swans sail north to the distant land of the Hyperboreans, and though the Delphians begged you to return—with paeans of flutes and circles of women dancing about the tripod— Apollo, you remained to rule that people through the long year. Came the season when the tripod rings loud and clear in Delphi, you turned the swans to Parnassos. It was high noon of summer when you glided back from the far northlands; swallows and nightingales were singing; cicadas also sang about you; silver brooks poured down from Kastalia, and the great river Kephissos threw blue-foaming waves into the bright wind, yes, even the waters knew a god was coming home.
Alcaeus
At the reception given by Jinnah on 14 August 1947 when Asghar Khan and Lt Col (later Maj. Gen.) Akbar Khan met Jinnah, Khan told Jinnah that they were disappointed that the higher posts in the armed forces had been given to British officers who still controlled their destiny. According to Asghar Khan, ‘the Quaid who had been listening patiently raised his finger and said, “Never forget that you are the servants of the state. You do not make policy. It is we, the people’s representatives, who decide how the country is to be run. Your job is only to obey the decision of your civilian masters.”’4 Could any politician have the temerity to say this to the army chief today? The answer has to be a resounding no. Hence, democratic governance in Pakistan instead of being a tripod of the executive, legislature and judiciary looks more like a garden umbrella in which the army is the central pole around which the other organs of the state revolve. Consequently, civilian governments in Pakistan have neither defined national security objectives nor developed strategies to implement them.
Tilak Devasher (Pakistan: Courting the Abyss)
But when I saw whence the light came, then indeed my breath grew thick. The plinth had opened beneath the image. Within, a clear blue fire danced on a tripod. It shone upon the Earth Mother, living, crowned with her diadem; her arms stretched forth over the earth were wreathed with twisting serpents. Her hands grasped their middles; the light shone on their polished skins, and I heard their hissing. My heart was a hammer shut in my breast; I made the sign of homage with a shaking hand. Rooted on my feet I looked at the Earth Mother; and the Earth Mother looked at me. And as she looked, I saw her eyelids tremble. I stood still, and stared. The flames flickered, and the Earth Mother looked straight before her. I took a pace forward, softly, and then another, and one more. She had not had time to paint her face, and the diadem leaned a little. As I came, I saw her gasp from holding her breath. She held out her arms stiffly, and the serpents wriggled, disliking the light, and wishing for their house again. But I did not watch them as I drew near; I watched her face. When I stretched out my hand toward them, I knew well enough that their teeth were drawn.
Mary Renault (The King Must Die (Theseus, #1))
The Smiths were unable to conceive children and decided to use a surrogate father to start their family. On the day the surrogate father was to arrive, Mr. Smith kissed his wife and said, "I'm off. The man should be here soon" Half an hour later, just by chance a door-to-door baby photographer rang the doorbell, hoping to make a sale. "Good morning, madam. I've come to...." "Oh, no need to explain. I've been expecting you," Mrs. Smith cut in. "Really?" the photographer asked. "Well, good. I've made a specialty of babies" "That's what my husband and I had hoped. Please come in and have a seat" After a moment, she asked, blushing, "Well, where do we start?" "Leave everything to me. I usually try two in the bathtub, one on the couch and perhaps a couple on the bed. Sometimes the living room floor is fun too; you can really spread out!" "Bathtub, living room floor? No wonder it didn't work for Harry and me" "Well, madam, none of us can guarantee a good one every time. But, if we try several different positions and I shoot from six or seven different angles, I'm sure you'll be pleased with the results" "My, that's a lot of....." gasped Mrs. Smith. "Madam, in my line of work, a man must take his time. I'd love to be in and out in five minutes, but you'd be disappointed with that, I'm sure"  "Don't I know it," Mrs. Smith said quietly. The photographer opened his briefcase and pulled out a portfolio of his baby pictures. "This was done on the top of a bus in downtown London" "Oh my God!" Mrs. Smith exclaimed, tugging at her handkerchief. "And these twins turned out exceptionally well, when you consider their mother was so difficult to work with" "She was difficult?" asked Mrs. Smith. "Yes, I'm afraid so. I finally had to take her to Hyde Park to get the job done right. People were crowding around four and five deep, pushing to get a good look" "Four and five deep?" asked Mrs. Smith, eyes widened in amazement. "Yes," the photographer said, "And for more than three hours too. The mother was constantly squealing and yelling. I could hardly concentrate. Then darkness approached and I began to rush my shots. Finally, when the squirrels began nibbling on my equipment, I just packed it all in." Mrs. Smith leaned forward. "You mean squirrels actually chewed on your, um......equipment?" "That's right. Well, madam, if you're ready, I'll set up my tripod so we  can get to work." "Tripod?????" "Oh yes, I have to use a tripod to rest my Canon on. It's much too big for me to hold for very long. Madam? Madam? ....... Good Lord, she's fainted!!
Adam Kisiel (101 foolproof jokes to use in case of emergency)
Ahab stood for a while leaning over the bulwarks; and then, as had been usual with him of late, calling a sailor of the watch, he sent him below for his ivory stool, and also his pipe. Lighting the pipe at the binnacle lamp and planting the stool on the weather side of the deck, he sat and smoked. In old Norse times, the thrones of the sea-loving Danish kings were fabricated, saith tradition, of the tusks of the Narwhale. How could one look at Ahab then, seated on that tripod of bones, without bethinking him of the royalty it symbolized? For a Khan of the plank, and a king of the sea, and a great lord of Leviathans was Ahab. Some moments passed, during which the thick vapor came from his mouth in quick and constant puffs, which blew back again into his face. "How now," he soliloquized at last, withdrawing the tube, "this smoking no longer soothes. Oh, my pipe! hard must it go with me if thy charm be gone! Here have I been unconsciously toiling, not pleasuring, aye, and ignorantly smoking to windward all the while; to windward, and with such nervous whiffs, as if, like the dying whale, my final jets were the strongest and fullest of trouble. What business have I with this pipe? This thing that is meant for sereneness, to send up mild white vapors among mild white hairs, not among torn iron-grey locks like mine. I'll smoke no more" He tossed the still lighted pipe into the sea. The fire hissed in the waves; the same instant the ship shot by the bubble the sinking pipe made. With slouched hat, Ahab lurchingly paced the planks.
Herman Melville (Moby-Dick or, The Whale)
Humanity came to its gods by accepting the reality of the symbol, that is, it came to the reality of thought, which has made man lord of the earth. Devotion, as Schiller correctly conceived it, is a regressive movement of libido towards the primordial, a diving down into the source of the first beginnings. Out of this there rises, as an image of the incipient progressive movement, the symbol, which is a condensation of all the operative unconscious factors—“living form,” as Schiller says, and a God-image, as history proves. It is therefore no accident that he should seize on a divine image, the Juno Ludovici, as a paradigm. Goethe makes the divine images of Paris and Helen float up from the tripod of the Mothers99—on the one hand the rejuvenated pair, on the other the symbol of a process of inner union, which is precisely what Faust passionately craves for himself as the supreme inner atonement. This is clearly shown in the ensuing scene as also from the further course of the drama. As we can see from the example of Faust, the vision of the symbol is a pointer to the onward course of life, beckoning the libido towards a still distant goal—but a goal that henceforth will burn unquenchably within him, so that his life, kindled as by a flame, moves steadily towards the far-off beacon. This is the specific life-promoting significance of the symbol, and such, too, is the meaning and value of religious symbols. I am speaking, of course, not of symbols that are dead and stiffened by dogma, but of living symbols that rise up from the creative unconscious of the living man.
C.G. Jung (Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Volume 6: Psychological Types (The Collected Works of C. G. Jung))
There is a creeping tendency to use made up acronyms at SpaceX. Excessive use of made up acronyms is a significant impediment to communication and keeping communication good as we grow is incredibly important. Individually, a few acronyms here and there may not seem so bad, but if a thousand people are making these up, over time the result will be a huge glossary that we have to issue to new employees. No one can actually remember all these acronyms and people don’t want to seem dumb in a meeting, so they just sit there in ignorance. This is particularly tough on new employees. That needs to stop immediately or I will take drastic action—I have given enough warnings over the years. Unless an acronym is approved by me, it should not enter the SpaceX glossary. If there is an existing acronym that cannot reasonably be justified, it should be eliminated, as I have requested in the past. For example, there should be no “HTS” [horizontal test stand] or “VTS” [vertical test stand] designations for test stands. Those are particularly dumb, as they contain unnecessary words. A “stand” at our test site is obviously a *test* stand. VTS-3 is four syllables compared with “Tripod,” which is two, so the bloody acronym version actually takes longer to say than the name! The key test for an acronym is to ask whether it helps or hurts communication. An acronym that most engineers outside of SpaceX already know, such as GUI, is fine to use. It is also ok to make up a few acronyms/contractions every now and again, assuming I have approved them, eg MVac and M9 instead of Merlin 1C-Vacuum or Merlin 1C-Sea Level, but those need to be kept to a minimum.
Ashlee Vance (Elon Musk: Inventing the Future)
There is a creeping tendency to use made up acronyms at SpaceX. Excessive use of made up acronyms is a significant impediment to communication and keeping communication good as we grow is incredibly important. Individually, a few acronyms here and there may not seem so bad, but if a thousand people are making these up, over time the result will be a huge glossary that we have to issue to new employees. No one can actually remember all these acronyms and people don’t want to seem dumb in a meeting, so they just sit there in ignorance. This is particularly tough on new employees. That needs to stop immediately or I will take drastic action—I have given enough warnings over the years. Unless an acronym is approved by me, it should not enter the SpaceX glossary. If there is an existing acronym that cannot reasonably be justified, it should be eliminated, as I have requested in the past. For example, there should be no “HTS” [horizontal test stand] or “VTS” [vertical test stand] designations for test stands. Those are particularly dumb, as they contain unnecessary words. A “stand” at our test site is obviously a *test* stand. VTS-3 is four syllables compared with “Tripod,” which is two, so the bloody acronym version actually takes longer to say than the name! The key test for an acronym is to ask whether it helps or hurts communication. An acronym that most engineers outside of SpaceX already know, such as GUI, is fine to use. It is also ok to make up a few acronyms/contractions every now and again, assuming I have approved them, eg MVac and M9 instead of Merlin 1C-Vacuum or Merlin 1C-Sea Level, but those need to be kept to a minimum. This
Ashlee Vance (Elon Musk: How the Billionaire CEO of SpaceX and Tesla is Shaping our Future)
But this isn't standard Japanese picnic fare: not a grain of rice or a pickled plum in sight. Instead, they fill the varnished wooden tables with thick slices of crusty bread, wedges of weeping cheese, batons of hard salamis, and slices of cured ham. To drink, bottles of local white wine, covered in condensation, and high-alcohol microbews rich in hops and local iconography. From the coastline we begin our slow, dramatic ascent into the mountains of Hokkaido. The colors bleed from broccoli to banana to butternut to beet as we climb, inching ever closer to the heart of autumn. My neighbors, an increasingly jovial group of thirtysomethings with a few words of English to spare, pass me a glass of wine and a plate of cheese, and I begin to feel the fog dissipate. We stop at a small train station in the foothills outside of Ginzan, and my entire car suddenly empties. A husband-and-wife team has set up a small stand on the train platform, selling warm apple hand pies made with layers of flaky pastry and apples from their orchard just outside of town. I buy one, take a bite, then immediately buy there more. Back on the train, young uniformed women flood the cars with samples of Hokkaido ice cream. The group behind me breaks out in song, a ballad, I'm later told, dedicated to the beauty of the season. Everywhere we go, from the golden fields of empty cornstalks to the dense forest thickets to the rushing rivers that carve up this land like the fat of a Wagyu steak, groups of camouflaged photographers lie in wait, tripods and shutter releases ready, hoping to capture the perfect photo of the SL Niseko steaming its way through the hills of Hokkaido.
Matt Goulding (Rice, Noodle, Fish: Deep Travels Through Japan's Food Culture)
Acronyms Seriously Suck: There is a creeping tendency to use made up acronyms at SpaceX. Excessive use of made up acronyms is a significant impediment to communication and keeping communication good as we grow is incredibly important. Individually, a few acronyms here and there may not seem so bad, but if a thousand people are making these up, over time the result will be a huge glossary that we have to issue to new employees. No one can actually remember all these acronyms and people don’t want to seem dumb in a meeting, so they just sit there in ignorance. This is particularly tough on new employees. That needs to stop immediately or I will take drastic action—I have given enough warnings over the years. Unless an acronym is approved by me, it should not enter the SpaceX glossary. If there is an existing acronym that cannot reasonably be justified, it should be eliminated, as I have requested in the past. For example, there should be no “HTS” [horizontal test stand] or “VTS” [vertical test stand] designations for test stands. Those are particularly dumb, as they contain unnecessary words. A “stand” at our test site is obviously a *test* stand. VTS-3 is four syllables compared with “Tripod,” which is two, so the bloody acronym version actually takes longer to say than the name! The key test for an acronym is to ask whether it helps or hurts communication. An acronym that most engineers outside of SpaceX already know, such as GUI, is fine to use. It is also ok to make up a few acronyms/contractions every now and again, assuming I have approved them, eg MVac and M9 instead of Merlin 1C-Vacuum or Merlin 1C-Sea Level, but those need to be kept to a minimum. This was classic Musk. The e-mail is rough in its tone and yet not really unwarranted for a guy who just wants things done as efficiently as possible. It obsesses over something that other people might find trivial and yet he has a definite point. It’s comical in that Musk wants all acronym approvals to run directly through him, but that’s entirely in keeping with the hands-on management style that has, mainly, worked well at both SpaceX and Tesla. Employees have since dubbed the acronym policy the ASS Rule.
Ashlee Vance (Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future)
OR. I will tell you, but these are the beginning for me of many [125] woes. After these evil things concerning my mother, on which I keep silence, had been wrought, I was driven an exile by the pursuits of the Erinnyes, when Loxias sent my foot [126] to Athens, that I might render satisfaction to the deities that must not be named. For there is a holy council, that Jove once on a time instituted for Mars on account of some pollution of his hands. [127] And coming thither, at first indeed no one of the strangers received me willingly, as being abhorred by the Gods, but they who had respect to me, afforded me [128] a stranger's meal at a separate table, being under the same house roof, and silently devised in respect to me, unaddressed by them, how I might be separated from their banquet [129] and cup, and, having filled up a share of wine in a separate vessel, equal for all, they enjoyed themselves. And I did not think fit to rebuke my guests, but I grieved in silence, and did not seem to perceive [their conduct,] deeply groaning, because I was my mother's slayer. [130] But I hear that my misfortunes have been made a festival at Athens, and that this custom still remains, that the people of Pallas honor the Libation Vessel. [131] But when I came to the hill of Mars, and stood in judgment, I indeed occupying one seat, but the eldest of the Erinnyes the other, having spoken and heard respecting my mother's death, Phœbus saved me by bearing witness, but Pallas counted out for me [132] the equal votes with her hand, and I came off victor in the bloody trial. [133] As many then as sat [in judgment,] persuaded by the sentence, determined to hold their dwelling near the court itself. [134] But as many of the Erinnyes as did not yield obedience to the sentence passed, continually kept driving me with unsettled wanderings, until I again returned to the holy ground of Phœbus, and lying stretched before the adyts, hungering for food, I swore that I would break from life by dying on the spot, unless Phœbus, who had undone, should preserve me. Upon this Phœbus, uttering a voice from the golden tripod, sent me hither to seize the heaven-sent image, and place it in the land of Athens. But that safety which he marked out for me do thou aid in. For if we can lay hold on the image of the Goddess, I both shall cease from my madness, and embarking thee in the bark of many oars, I shall settle thee again in Mycenæ. But, O beloved one, O sister mine, preserve my ancestral home, and preserve me, since all my state and that of the Pelopids is undone, unless we seize on the heavenly image of the Goddess.
Euripides (The Tragedies of Euripides, Volume I.)
Language systems stand on a tripod. There's the language, there's the libraries, and there are the tools. And how successful a language is depends on a complex interaction between those three things.
Peter Seibel (Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming)
Aristotle, around 350 BCE, raised the possibility of machines replacing humans: For if every instrument could accomplish its own work, obeying or anticipating the will of others, like the statues of Daedalus, or the tripods of Hephaestus, which, says the poet, “of their own accord entered the assembly of the Gods”; if, in like manner, the shuttle would weave and the plectrum touch the lyre without a hand to guide them, chief workmen would not want servants, nor masters slaves.
Robert J. Shiller (Narrative Economics: How Stories Go Viral and Drive Major Economic Events)
Hegel also pointed out that part of the content of the division of time into past, present, or future seemed able to transcend these temporal units because the parts in question were simply true. Time does not seem to matter to things like triangles or tripods because their qualities are either timeless or eternal. A future triangle would be like any triangle past or present. Truth, in other words, seems either to eradicate time or, at least, to take the temporality out of time. In the terms that Hegel began to establish, Kant’s disquieting claim about the injustice built into time, history, and progress began to look more surmountable. On one side, there was a world made up of moments, some present, some past, some future. The future would turn into the present and negate itself. The present would turn into the past but could still be available in the present. The passage of time and the endless stream of negations of negations built into the human ability to make choices and decisions would give rise to many diferent values, arrangements, and worldviews. Some, however, might turn out to be true. This was the hallmark of the other side of human history. If something was true, it would fall out of time and become, simply, timeless. On Kant’s terms, time and history were the problem. On Hegel’s terms, they were the solution.
Michael Sonenscher (After Kant: The Romans, the Germans, and the Moderns in the History of Political Thought)
When Arizona emerged from dry dock with new steel plates welded into place on the portside blister to close the gash from the collision, there was a far more noticeable and ominous change in the ship’s appearance. The Navy’s peacetime color scheme of light gray had given way to a dark bluish-gray applied to the hull and superstructure up to the level of the bridge. Only the foretop and maintop enclosures on the two tripod masts and the tops of the masts themselves were still light gray. This was a form of wartime camouflage that supposedly made the ship less likely to stand out against the horizon.
Walter R. Borneman (Brothers Down: Pearl Harbor and the Fate of the Many Brothers Aboard the USS Arizona)
For nothing, as I now see it, equals the value of life - not the wealth they say prosperous ilium possessed in earlier days, when there was peace, before the coming of the Greeks, nor all the treasure piled up behind the stone threshold of Phoebus Apollo in rocky Delphi. Cattle and fat sheep can be lifted. Tripods and chestnut horses can be procured. But you cannot lift or procure a man's life, when once the breath has left his lips.
Achilles (Homer)
It offered so many columns, pediments, friezes, tripods, gladiators, urns and volutes that it looked as if it had not been built of white marble, but squeezed out of a pastry tube. It was, however, built of white marble. No one knew that but the owners who had paid for it. It was now of a streaked, blotched, leprous color, neither brown nor green but the worst tones of both, the color of slow rot, the color of smoke, gas fumes and acids eating into a delicate stone intended for clean air and open country. The Frink National Bank Building, however, was a great success. It had been so great a success that it was the last structure Guy Francon ever designed; its prestige spared him the bother from then on.
Ayn Rand (The Fountainhead)
He gave me a lecture on the futility of self-recrimination, the importance of realizing that the only good lesson to be learned from the past was how to avoid similar errors in the future.
John Christopher (Tripods: The Pool of Fire: Book 3)
For an even more elaborate inner tantra practice, we may construct an additional offering. Place a tripod in the center of the shrine and upon it a skull cup with its narrower end facing forward. In the skull cup place melted butter containing blessing materials of the lineage. When the butter is solid, write the Tibetan letter BAM on its surface, then add either an alcoholic beverage or pure spring water layered over the butter. Place a triangle made of wooden pieces on top of the tripod with one point facing front. It is covered with a red cloth folded into four layers, and on the cloth is placed a ritual mirror, or melong, coated with red dust in which the syllable TAM is written. On top of all these, place a quartz crystal.
Khenchen Palden Sherab (Tara's Enlightened Activity: An Oral Commentary on the Twenty-One Praises to Tara)
gadget roughly the size of a large camera tripod. I use this several times a week, when it’s too much
Timothy Ferriss (Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers)
We’ve a three-point civilization: the Imperial Household balanced against the Federated Great Houses of the Landsraad, and between them, the Guild with its damnable monopoly on interstellar transport. In politics, the tripod is the most unstable of all structures. It’d be bad enough without the complication of a feudal trade culture which turns its back on most science.
Frank Herbert (Frank Herbert's Dune Saga Collection (Dune #1-6))
Herbert Ponting, the expedition’s photographer, or “camera artist,” as he prefers to call himself, tries to photograph a pod of six killer whales that are attempting to hunt penguins at the edge of the sea ice. He takes his camera and tripod to the very edge of the sea ice but the whales, seeing him, go under the ice, coming up and breaking it into small floes. Ponting is left rocking on one of the floes when one of the whales rears out of the water, its head over the edge of the floe, trying to grab him.
Lloyd Spencer Davis (A Polar Affair: Antarctica's Forgotten Hero and the Secret Love Lives of Penguins)
Spacing Guild: one leg of the political tripod maintaining the Great Convention. The Guild was the second mental-physical training school (see Bene Gesserit) after the Butlerian Jihad. The Guild monopoly on space travel and transport and upon international banking is taken as the beginning point of the Imperial Calendar.
Brian Herbert (House Atreides (Prelude to Dune, #1))
I thought about taking a video of myself giving you a lap dance, but I don’t have anything to mount your phone on, so this was the next best thing.” “I will happily go back into the woods, find some sticks, and build you a tripod, Daphne,” he says.
Emily Henry (Funny Story)
The EOS rebel t7/2000d allows you to have 6 fps continuous shooting, and the camera will even work with a remote for live view shooting from a tripod
Alexis Rodriguez (Canon EOS Rebel T7/2000D User Guide: The Complete Beginners and Pro User Manual to Master the New Canon EOS Rebel T7/2000D Best Hidden Features including Tips & Tricks for DSLR Photography)
top of the Arc de Triomphe. I wasn’t allowed to take my tripod up there, so I had to get creative. But, man, it was worth it! I took my best night shot of the Champs-Elysées with its horse
Alix Nichols (The Darcy Brothers: A Complete Series Box Set)
Yeah, well,” I say, “I thought about taking a video of myself giving you a lap dance, but I don’t have anything to mount your phone on, so this was the next best thing.” “I will happily go back into the woods, find some sticks, and build you a tripod, Daphne,” he says.
Emily Henry (Funny Story)
A Martian Midsummer Night's Dream by Stewart Stafford On Mars's pristine ruddy hue, we tread, Above, stars as adamantine algae spread. Phobos and Deimos, twin moons fair, Primeval river beds form a spidery lair. Dust storms tower above dried-up seas, A vast red alien desert, shorn of trees. Oberon and Titania's gamesmanship spite, Quarrel deep in the Martian summer night. Puckish antics stir starry lovers' hearts true, As spells and dreams on tangled paths pursue. On Olympus Mons, Vulcan gods watch and scheme, Echoes of old wars fuelling plans extreme; A Wellsian tome of the tripod Martian foe, Of invasive seeds, spread to Earth to sow. In Valles Marineris, where canyons stretch away, Dead of night gives birth to coppery day. A frontier vision, both opaque and diamond clear, Magical flights of fancy on an untamed sphere. © 2024, Stewart Stafford. All rights reserved.
Stewart Stafford
Tripods and monoculars, either for birdwatchers or perverts, filled a final display beside the till.
Nick Harkaway (Karla's Choice: A John le Carré Novel)
The ETX-90 sells for about $400 and comes with an Autostar computerized controller and a tripod. This instrument automatically points at almost any object you specify if that object is in view from your location at that time. The Autostar can even find moving objects, such as planets, based on stored information, and it’s equipped to give you a “tour” of the best sights in the sky, selected with no input from you. A good competing telescope for the ETX-90 is the Celestron SkyProdigy 90. It’s comparably sized and equipped and has the capability to automatically align itself on the sky, after which it points to almost any celestial object that you select. It goes for about $600. You definitely don’t want to spend this much money on a telescope until you see the same model in action at an astronomy club observing meeting or a star party (see Chapter 2). But the price is no more than you pay for a fine camera and an accessory lens or two. You can find larger telescopes for less money — check the ads in current issues of astronomy magazines — but you have to invest much more effort in learning to use them effectively. Some brand-name telescopes are sold through authorized dealers that tend to have expert knowledge. But take their advice with just a wee bit of salt. Here are some key websites to browse for telescope product information:
Stephen Maran (Astronomy For Dummies)
Another badass Gurkha in recent memory was Sergeant Dipprasad Pun of the Royal Gurkha Rifles. In 2010, while serving as the lone on-duty guard patrolling a small one-room outpost on the edge of the Afghan province of Helmand, Pun was suddenly ambushed by somewhere between fifteen and thirty Taliban warriors armed with RPGs and assault rifles. During his Ultimate Mega Gurkha Freakout Limit Break Mode, the five-foot-seven-inch sergeant fired off four hundred rounds of machine gun ammunition (every bullet he had), chucked seventeen grenades, detonated a remote mine, and then took an enemy soldier down by chucking a twenty-pound machine gun tripod into the dude’s face.
Ben Thompson (Badass: Ultimate Deathmatch: Skull-Crushing True Stories of the Most Hardcore Duels, Showdowns, Fistfights, Last Stands, Suicide Charges, and Military Engagements of All Time (Badass Series))
earned fame and the Medal of Honor for the steel nerves and sheer guts he showed in turning back the Japs that night. Later, I read an interview where Basilone told how he did what seemed impossible against the charging Japs—not once but over and over again—with three machine guns and a pistol. “We kept firing and drove them back, but our ammunition was getting low,” he said, “so I left the guns and started running to the next outfit to get some more. Soon after I got back, a runner came in and told me that at the emplacements on the right, Japs had broken through . . . and the guns were jammed. “I took off up the trail to see what happened. . . . After that I came back to my own guns, grabbed one of them, and told the crew to follow me. Up the trail we went. I was carrying the machine gun by the tripod. We left six dead Japs on the trail. “While I fixed the jams on the other two guns up there, we started to set up. We were really pinned down. Bullets were smacking into the sandbags. “The Japs were still coming at us, and I rolled over from one gun to the other, firing them as fast as they could be loaded. . . . We all thought our end had come. “Some Japs would sneak through the lines and behind us. It got pretty bad because I’d have to stop firing every once in a while and shoot behind me with my pistol. “At dawn, our guns were just burnt out. Altogether we got rid of 26,000 rounds.” More
Jim McEnery (Hell in the Pacific: A Marine Rifleman's Journey From Guadalcanal to Peleliu)
The text is filled with anecdotes and accounts of effective managers putting to use the very skills that Lissack and Roos call on the rest of us to develop. We visit Southwest Airlines, lKEA, Tripod, and other exemplars of success. Though there is much discussion of chaos and complexity theory, there is no showy science or gratuitous mathematics. Though a work of philosophy by a pair of professional scholars, there's not a speck of academic pretension. No, you won't find recipes, roadmaps, or 12 steps to recovery here. But as you read this book you may find yourself asking why you ever thought other authors could provide such all-purpose solutions to the unique vexations of your own organization life.
Kamil Karczmarczyk
Individual identities and national destines were shaped by the tripod of history, geography, and philosophy.
Patrick Mendis (Peaceful War: How the Chinese Dream and the American Destiny Create a New Pacific World Order)
Careful," Janet exclaimed sharply, as Lara's heavy skirts brushed the side of a glass bowl set in a tripod mahogany stand, causing it to wobble. Lara glanced down at the forlorn pair of goldfish swimming in the bowl, and then back at Janet's pinched, narrow face. "They shouldn't be placed in the window," Lara heard herself murmur. "They don't like too much light.
Lisa Kleypas (Stranger in My Arms)
The traveling press had become the province of what one prickly print reporter (on his way to a buyout) called “the Human Tripods,” the young network embeds who’d never covered a campaign before and who had to capture everything the candidate did on video.
Amy Chozick (Chasing Hillary: On the Trail of the First Woman President Who Wasn't)
Schwartzman smiled, sharing his enthusiasm. When the morgue had installed a camera with a UV filter on a tripod for timed exposures to help her identify pre- and perimortem injury patterns under the skin, she’d been as excited as Roger was now. Of course, at the time she’d been surrounded by dead people in drawers, so she’d kept the excitement to herself.
Danielle Girard (Excise (Dr. Schwartzman, #2))
Of course, we respect your decision, Farmer Ben,” he said. “I’d like to make one last request, if I may. Would you allow us cubs to sleep in the barn tomorrow night? Sort of our way of saying good-bye to the farm.” “A sleepover?” said Ben. “Why, sure. After everything you cubs have done for Mrs. Ben and me, it’s the least I can do.” “Then perhaps you’ll grant me another last request,” said Ferdy. “Would you and the cubs wait while I go home and get my camera and tripod? I’d like to take a group photo right here in the living room.” “I’d be honored,” said Farmer Ben. “Go on, son. Git!” Trudy went with Ferdy so she could carry the camera while he carried the tripod. As they headed down the drive to the front gate, Trudy said, “A sleepover and group photo are wonderful ideas, Ferd. Very sweet.” “Sweet has nothing to do with it,” said Ferdy. “I think I know how to save the Halloween Festival--and, thus, the farm!
Stan Berenstain (The Berenstain Bears and the Haunted Hayride)
The walls were draped with banners covered with cabalistic signs, an abundance of owls of all kinds, scarabs and ibises, and Oriental divinities of uncertain origin. Near the rear wall was a dais, a proscenium of burning torches held up by rough logs, and in the background an altar with a triangular altarpiece and statuettes of Isis and Osiris. The room was ringed by an amphitheater of figures of Anubis, and there was a portrait of Cagliostro (it could hardly have been of anyone else, could it?), a gilded mummy in Cheops format, two five-armed candelabra, a gong suspended from two rampant snakes, on a podium a lectern covered by calico printed with hieroglyphics, and two crowns, two tripods, a little portable sarcophagus, a throne, a fake seventeenth-century fauteuil, four unmatched chairs suitable for a banquet with the sheriff of Nottingham, and candles, tapers, votive lights, all flickering very spiritually.
Umberto Eco (Foucault's Pendulum)
Can we take my car?" she asked. He turned and looked at her, surprised. "This will all fit in mine." "I have more gear in my car trunk. It's stuff I don't always use but never know when I'll need it. Specialized equipment. Reflectors and tripods, extra flashes and a change of clothes, hiking boots and the like." Cat laughed at the expression on Travis's face. "You guessed it. I keep my magic broom there, too." "I was wondering where you hid it," he said mildly.
Elizabeth Lowell (To the Ends of the Earth)