Tsunami Book Quotes

He swept in like a tsunami, wave after wave, and I didn’t stand a chance. All those warnings, all the things they tried to prepare me for—lost in an instant—to the enormity of what I felt.

Except fang. I glared at him. "Go on, try to stop me, I dare you." It was like the old days when we used to wrestle, each trying to get the better of the other. I was ready to take him down, my hands curled into fist. "I was just going to say be careful," Fang told me. He stepped closer and brushed some hair out of my eyes. "And I've got your back." He motioned with his head toward the torpedo chamber. Oh my God. It hit me like a tsunami then, how perfect he was for me, how no one else would ever, could ever, be so perfect for me, how he was everything I could possibly hope for, as a friend, boyfriend, maybe even more. He was it for me. There would be no more looking. I really, really loved him, with a whole new kind of love I'd never felt before, something that made every other kind of love I'd ever felt feel washed out and wimpy in comparison. I loved him with every cell in my body, every thought in my head, every feather in my wings, every breathe in my lungs. and air sacs. Too bad I was going out to face almost certain death. Right there in front of everyone, I threw my arms around his neck and smashed my mouth against his. He was startled for a second, then his strong arms wrapped around me so tightly I could hardly breathe. "ZOMG," I heard Nudge whisper, but still fang and I kissed slanting our heads this way and that to get closer. I could have stood there and kissed him happily for the next millennium, but Angel, or what was left of her was still out there in the could dark ocean. Reluctantly, I ended the kiss, took a step back. Fang's obsidian eyes were glittering brightly and his stoic face had a look of wonder on it."Gotta go," I said quietly. A half smile quirked his mouth. "Yeah. Hurry back." I nodded and he stepped out of the air lock chamber, keeping his eyes fixed on me, memorizing me as he hit the switch that sealed the chamber. The doors hissed shut with a kind of finality, and I realized that my heart was beating so hard it felt like it was going to start snapping ribs. I was scared. I was crazily, deeply, incredibly, joyously, terrifyingly in love. I was on a death mission. Before my head simply exploded from so much emotion, I hit the large button that pressurized the air lock enough for the doors to open to the ocean outside. I really, really hoped that I would prove somewhat uncrushable, like Angel did. The door cracked open below me and I saw the first dark glint of frigid water.

I saw a banner hanging next to city hall in downtown Philadelphia that read, "Kill them all, and let God sort them out." A bumper sticker read, "God will judge evildoers; we just have to get them to him." I saw a T-shirt on a soldier that said, "US Air Force... we don't die; we just go to hell to regroup." Others were less dramatic- red, white, and blue billboards saying, "God bless our troops." "God Bless America" became a marketing strategy. One store hung an ad in their window that said, "God bless America--$1 burgers." Patriotism was everywhere, including in our altars and church buildings. In the aftermath of September 11th, most Christian bookstores had a section with books on the event, calendars, devotionals, buttons, all decorated in the colors of America, draped in stars and stripes, and sprinkled with golden eagles. This burst of nationalism reveals the deep longing we all have for community, a natural thirst for intimacy... September 11th shattered the self-sufficient, autonomous individual, and we saw a country of broken fragile people who longed for community- for people to cry with, be angry with, to suffer with. People did not want to be alone in their sorrow, rage, and fear. But what happened after September 11th broke my heart. Conservative Christians rallies around the drums of war. Liberal Christian took to the streets. The cross was smothered by the flag and trampled under the feet of angry protesters. The church community was lost, so the many hungry seekers found community in the civic religion of American patriotism. People were hurting and crying out for healing, for salvation in the best sense of the word, as in the salve with which you dress a wound. A people longing for a savior placed their faith in the fragile hands of human logic and military strength, which have always let us down. They have always fallen short of the glory of God. ...The tragedy of the church's reaction to September 11th is not that we rallied around the families in New York and D.C. but that our love simply reflected the borders and allegiances of the world. We mourned the deaths of each soldier, as we should, but we did not feel the same anger and pain for each Iraqi death, or for the folks abused in the Abu Ghraib prison incident. We got farther and farther from Jesus' vision, which extends beyond our rational love and the boundaries we have established. There is no doubt that we must mourn those lives on September 11th. We must mourn the lives of the soldiers. But with the same passion and outrage, we must mourn the lives of every Iraqi who is lost. They are just as precious, no more, no less. In our rebirth, every life lost in Iraq is just as tragic as a life lost in New York or D.C. And the lives of the thirty thousand children who die of starvation each day is like six September 11ths every single day, a silent tsunami that happens every week.

Let’s face it, disaster follows my every move. Like a newborn duck imprinted on a tsunami.” “That…makes no sense,” he said. A & E Kirk (2014-05-26). Drop Dead Demons: The Divinicus Nex Chronicles: Book 2 (Divinicus Nex Chronicles series) (p. 567). A&E Kirk. Kindle Edition.

Artificial Intelligence is not a new wave of technology. It is much more like a Tsunami that threatens to flood us if we are not mindful.

And to my son Patrick, without whose assistance (as P.G.Wodehouse said somewhere of his daughter) this book would have been completed in half the time, all love and all joy.

The notion that evil is non-rational is a more significant claim for Eagleton than at first appears, because he is (in this book [On Evil] as in others of his recent 'late period' prolific burst) anxious to rewrite theology: God (whom he elsewhere tells us is nonexistent, but this is no barrier to his being lots of other things for Eagleton too, among them Important) is not to be regarded as rational: with reference to the Book of Job Eagleton says, 'To ask after God's reasons for allowing evil, so [some theologians] claim, is to imagine him as some kind of rational or moral being, which is the last thing he is.' This is priceless: with one bound God is free of responsibility for 'natural evil'—childhood cancers, tsunamis that kill tens of thousands—and for moral evil also even though 'he' is CEO of the company that purposely manufactured its perpetrators; and 'he' is incidentally exculpated from blame for the hideous treatment meted out to Job.

they did not tell me it would hurt like this no one warned me about the heartbreak we experience with friends where are the albums i thought there were no songs sung for it i could not find the ballads or read the books dedicated to writing the grief we fall into when friends leave it is the type of heartache that does not hit you like a tsunami it is a slow cancer the kind that does not show up for months has no visible signs is an ache here a headache there but manageable cancer or tsunami it all ends the same a friend or a lover a loss is a loss is a loss - the underrated heartache

they did not tell me it would hurt like this no one warned me about the heartbreak we experience with friends where are the albums i thought there were no songs sung for it i could not find the ballads or read the books dedicated to writing the grief we fall into when friends leave it is the type of heartache that does not hit you like a tsunami it is a slow cancer the kind that does not show up for months has no visible signs is an ache here a headache there but manageable cancer or tsunami it all ends the same a friend or a lover a loss is a loss is a loss - the underrated heartache

Ibn al-Qayyim has a profound statement in his book Al-Fawaid. Referring to the effect of negative and sinful thoughts, he said: “You should repulse a thought. If you do not do so, it will develop into a desire. You should therefore wage war against it. If you do not do so, it will become a resolution and firm intention. If you do not repulse this, it will develop into a deed. If you do not make up for it by doing the opposite [the opposite of that evil deed], it will become a habit. It will then be very difficult for you to give it up”. Another similar quote: “You should know the initial stage of every knowledge that is within your choice is your thoughts and notions. These thoughts and notions lead you into fantasies. These fantasies lead towards the will and desire to carry out [those fantasies]. These wills and desires demand the act should be committed. Repeatedly committing these acts causes them to become a habit. So the goodness of these stages lies in the goodness of thoughts and notions, and the wickedness of these thoughts lies in the wickedness of thoughts and notions”. May Allah be pleased with him! He offers a deep insight into something so subtle. We should all memorise these words and use it whenever we feel unable to control the tsunami of negative thoughts that overtake our minds.

Nassim Taleb writes in his book Fooled By Randomness: In Pharaonic Egypt … scribes tracked the high-water mark of the Nile and used it as an estimate for a future worst-case scenario. The same can be seen in the Fukushima nuclear reactor, which experienced a catastrophic failure in 2011 when a tsunami struck. It had been built to withstand the worst past historical earthquake, with the builders not imagining much worse—and not thinking that the worst past event had to be a surprise, as it had no precedent. This is not a failure of analysis. It’s a failure of imagination. Realizing the future might not look anything like the past is a special kind of skill that is not generally looked highly upon by the financial forecasting community. At a 2017 dinner I attended in New York, Daniel Kahneman was asked how investors should respond when our forecasts are wrong. He said: Whenever we are surprised by something, even if we admit that we made a mistake, we say, ‘Oh I’ll never make that mistake again.’ But, in fact, what you should learn when you make a mistake because you did not anticipate something is that the world is difficult to anticipate. That’s the correct lesson to learn from surprises: that the world is surprising.

Grief is a liar and an ocean. Just when you think you’ve reached the shore, it rises up again and swallows you whole. Weeks can go by without any tears at all, and then an unexpected card stuck in a book can knock you flat on your face sure as any tsunami. And your throat burns and sputters and chokes, drowning in a torrent of salt-stung water, as you gasp for air and try so desperately to wake up from this dream.

I’ve spoken to people in Rwanda who survived the genocide. And I’ve spoken to people who’ve survived acts of God, like in Sri Lanka after the tsunami. And I’ve found that suffering usually draws people closer to God and gives them more faith. I think that the main driver in the human spirit is hope. Man can endure anything if he has hope.” I was reminded of Man’s Search for Meaning, the book Viktor Frankl wrote about surviving Nazi concentration camps, and how he said that the most important survival skill to have was faith. As he put it, “Woe to him who saw no more sense in his life, no aim, no purpose, and therefore no point in carrying on.

Few seem to be able to eat a turkey leg at Disneyland without splattering tsunami scale grease, so grab plenty of napkins or wear a bib, tablecloth or scuba suit.

In 1988 two consultants, Jim Rosenthal and Juan Ocampo, wrote Securitization of Credit, a road map that helped Citibank and Chase Manhattan survive the South American debt crisis. The book, the first on a subject that soon washed over the financial world like a tsunami, showed the banks, unable to earn their way out of their bad debt situation, that by securitizing the loans on their books—packaging them up and selling them into the secondary debt markets—they could effectively walk away from the loans, albeit while still taking a hit to their balance sheets.

In the nonstop tsunami of global information, librarians provide us with floaties and teach us how to swim. – Linton Weeks, Washington Post, 13 January 2001

I can’t decide if Burt and Crazel are made for each other or if their joint mentalism could cause a tsunami.” Tea – Book 2 “Having it

After Steve’s death I received letters of condolence from people all over the world. I would like to thank everyone who sent such thoughtful sympathy. Your kind words and support gave me the strength to write this book and so much more. Carolyn Male is one of those dear people who expressed her thoughts and feelings after we lost Steve. It was incredibly touching and special, and I wanted to express my appreciation and gratitude. I’m happy to share it with you. It is with a still-heavy heart that I rise this evening to speak about the life and death of one of the greatest conservationists of our time: Steve Irwin. Many people describe Steve Irwin as a larrikin, inspirational, spontaneous. For me, the best way I can describe Steve Irwin is formidable. He would stand and fight, and was not to be defeated when it came to looking after our environment. When he wanted to get things done--whether that meant his expansion plans for the zoo, providing aid for animals affected by the tsunami and the cyclones, organizing scientific research, or buying land to conserve its environmental and habitat values--he just did it, and woe betide anyone who stood in his way. I am not sure I have ever met anyone else who was so determined to get the conservation message out across the globe, and I believe he achieved his aim. What I admired most about him was that he lived the conservation message every day of his life. Steve’s parents, Bob and Lyn, passed on their love of the Australian bush and their passion for rescuing and rehabilitating wildlife. Steve took their passion and turned it into a worldwide crusade. The founding of Wildlife Warriors Worldwide in 2002 provided Steve and Terri with another vehicle to raise awareness of conservation by allowing individuals to become personally involved in protecting injured, threatened, or endangered wildlife. It also has generated a working fund that helps with the wildlife hospital on the zoo premises and supports work with endangered species in Asia and Africa. Research was always high on Steve’s agenda, and his work has enabled a far greater understanding of crocodile behavior, population, and movement patterns. Working with the Queensland Parks and Wildlife Service and the University of Queensland, Steve was an integral part of the world’s first Crocs in Space research program. His work will live on and inform us for many, many years to come. Our hearts go out to his family and the Australia Zoo family. It must be difficult to work at the zoo every day with his larger-than-life persona still very much evident. Everyone must still be waiting for him to walk through the gate. His presence is everywhere, and I hope it lives on in the hearts and minds of generations of wildlife warriors to come. We have lost a great man in Steve Irwin. It is a great loss to the conservation movement. My heart and the hearts of everyone here goes out to his family. Carolyn Male, Member for Glass House, Queensland, Australia October 11, 2006

Phyllis Tickle, in her book The Great Emergence,2 argues that we are undergoing the most recent of our every-500-year “rummage sales”—an upheaval in culture and worldview that will inevitably reshape our faith interpretations and institutions as surely as the Great Schism of the eleventh century and the Great Reformation of the sixteenth century. This tsunami of change is well under way, marked by the postmodern and post-Christian sensibilities of the millennial generation.

All street-level parking in the area has been flooded and vehicles swept away. Ground-level exits from the stadium are also blocked. Furthermore, the area surrounding the stadium has many hazards, including downed power lines, sink-holes of soft mud, and broken glass. There is also the risk of another tsunami if a big aftershock occurs.

I PALE HORSE 1 THE VIRUS NOW known as Hendra wasn’t the first of the scary new bugs. It wasn’t the worst. Compared to some others, it seems relatively minor. Its mortal impact, in numerical terms, was small at the start and has remained small; its geographical scope was narrowly local and later episodes haven’t carried it much more widely. It made its debut near Brisbane, Australia, in 1994. Initially there were two cases, only one of them fatal. No, wait, correction: There were two human cases, one human fatality. Other victims suffered and died too, more than a dozen—equine victims—and their story is part of this story. The subject of animal disease and the subject of human disease are, as we’ll see, strands of one braided cord. The original emergence of Hendra virus didn’t seem very dire or newsworthy unless you happened to live in eastern Australia. It couldn’t match an earthquake, a war, a schoolboy gun massacre, a tsunami. But it was peculiar. It was spooky. Slightly better known now, at least among disease scientists and Australians, and therefore slightly less spooky, Hendra virus still seems peculiar. It’s a paradoxical thing: marginal, sporadic, but in some larger sense representative. For exactly that reason, it marks a good point from which to begin toward understanding the emergence of certain virulent new realities on this planet—realities that include the death of more than 30 million people since 1981. Those realities involve a phenomenon called zoonosis. A zoonosis is an animal infection transmissible to humans. There are more such diseases than you might expect. AIDS is one. Influenza is a whole category of others. Pondering them as a group tends to reaffirm the old Darwinian truth (the darkest of his truths, well known and persistently forgotten) that humanity is a kind of animal, inextricably connected with other animals: in origin and in descent, in sickness and in health. Pondering them individually—for starters, this relatively obscure case from Australia—provides a salubrious reminder that everything, including pestilence, comes from somewhere.

AUTHOR'S INTRODUCTION: More than twenty-five years ago while researching the fourth Saint-Germain book, Path of the Eclipse, I ran across references to the Year of the Yellow Snow, sometimes called the Year of the Dark Sun, in Western reckoning A.D. 535-36, which was characterized by catastrophic drops in temperature, crop failures, and famine throughout Asia and Europe, with disruption of trade and movements of populations resulting from these losses—just the sort of event to set the speculative juices, flowing, but not the object of my research, nor the period with which I was dealing, promising though it appeared. Then, about ten years ago, other researchers did some serious scholarship on those disastrous events and tried to determine the cause of what turned out to be a worldwide famine and, after considering a number of different scenarios from meteor collisions to a mini-ice age—which indeed occurred—at last identified the probable source of the trouble as an eruption of that all-time bad-boy volcano, Krakatoa; this eruption was more overwhelming than many of its others, for, according to records in Indonesia, this eruption broke Sumatra off from Java—Krakatoa is at the hinge position of those two islands—and opened the Sundra Strait to a deep-water sea passage instead of only the shallowest-draft boats, which it had been for centuries. The eruption occurred in late February or early March of A.D. 535, and its explosion was heard all the way to Beijing. It had been heralded by many months of regional instability, earthquakes, and drastic variations in ocean temperatures in and around what was becoming the Sundra Strait, making the shipping lanes more treacherous than they had been in the past. Many ships' captains reported dangerous sailing in and around Indonesia, and over time, merchant ships avoided the region. ¶ In April, following the eruption, the ash from the volcano had spread all around the world, and disaster followed after it, impacting global weather patterns and lowering the average temperatures sufficiently to keep crops from growing in most of Asia and Europe, as well as large portions of Africa and Americas. Although every part of the world was affected, there were regions that bore more of the brunt of the tragedy than others. Many of the nomadic people of the Central Asian Steppes were driven out of their traditional grazing lands when their herds began to die because of lack of food as the grasslands became arid plains, and their struggle to find new pastureland was made much more difficult by the impact of the colder weather; the significant westward migration from Central Asia began as an attempt to find grass for their herds. In China and Tibet, the snow that continued to fall all the way into June and July was yellow due to the high levels of sulfur in the upper atmosphere. Closer to the eruption site, actual flakes of sulfur fell from the sky, burning people, animals, and fields alike and contaminating wells, springs, and rivers; the devastation of the Indonesian Islands was calamitous, with tens of thousands of people killed in tsunamis spawned by the eruption, by gaseous emanations, and by sulfur contamination, records of which still exist in the royal archives of the Srivijava Empire, which comprised most of modern Indonesia. For months afterward, the remains of humans, animals, trees, sea-life, and buildings washed up on the shores of what are now Indonesia, the Malay Peninsula, the Philippines, China, and India.

Ten best quotes of the book, “Miracles Through My Eyes” "Miracles Through My Eyes " by Dinesh Sahay Author- Mentor {This book was published on 23rd October in 2019) 1. “God is always there to fulfil each demand, prayer or wish provided you have intent; unshaken trust in Him, determination and action on the ground, and when this entire manifest in one’s life, then it becomes a miracle of life. Nothing moves without His grace. It comes when you are on the right path without selfish motives but will never happen when done for selfish and destructive motives”. 2. “All diseases are self-creation and they come due to some cause and it transforms into a disease by virtue of wrong thinking, wrong actions which are against nature, the universe and God. When you disobey the rules set by God. All misfortunes, accidents, deceases, and even death are the creation of negative, bad thoughts, spoken words and actions of man himself, at some stage of his life. All good events in life are also the creation of man through his good and positive thoughts at various stages of his life”. 3. “The biggest investments lie not in the savings and creation of wealth with selfish motives. Though you may find success this prosperity shall not be long lasting and at a later stage, the money and wealth may be lost slowly in many unfortunate ways”. 4. “If you want to have a successful life with ease and at the same time want abundance and wealth then my friend, you must care for others. You must start your all efforts to help by means of tithing, charity, service to mankind in any form, and help poor, helpless, needy and underprivileged.” 5. “The largest investment for a person (which is time tested by many rich personalities) shall be to give 10% of your monthly income for the charitable cause each month if you are a salaried class, and if you are a businessman or a company, then you must contribute 10% annually for charitable cause”. 6. “Nature is giving signals to the mankind that they are moving near to destruction of this earth as it’s a cause and effect of man-made destruction of earth and with all sins, hate, untruthfulness and violence it carried throughout the centuries and acted against the principals of the universe and nature. Those connected to the divine may escape from the clutches of death and destruction of the earth. We have witnessed many major catastrophes in the form of Tsunami’s, earthquakes, Tornado’s, Global warming and volcanic eruptions and the world is moving towards it further major happenings in times to come”. 7. “Let us pray for peace and harmony for all humanity and make this world a better place to live by our actions of love, compassion, truthfulness, non-violence, end of terrorism and peace on earth with no wars with any country. Let there will be single governance in the world, the governance of one religion, the religion of love, peace, prosperity and healthy living to all”. 8.” Forgive all the people who often unreasonable, self-centred or accuse you of selfish and forget the all that is said about you. It is your own inner reflection which you see in the outer world. 9. “Thought has a tremendous vibratory force which moves with limitless speed and, makes all creations in man’s life. Each thought vibrates to the frequency with which it was created by a person, whether that was good or bad, travels accordingly through the conscious and subconscious mind in space and the universe. It vibrates with time and energy to produces manifestation in the spiritual and materialistic world of man or woman or matter (thing), in form of events, happenings and creativity”.

Modern art is a waste of time. When the zombies show up, you can't worry about art. Art is for people who aren't worried about zombies. Besides zombies and icebergs, there are other things that Soap has been thinking about. Tsunamis, earthquakes, Nazi dentists, killer bees, army ants, black plague, old people, divorce lawyers, sorority girls, Jimmy Carter, giant quids, rabid foxes, strange dogs, new anchors, child actors, fascists, narcissists, psychologists, ax murderers, unrequited love, footnotes, zeppelins, the Holy Ghost, Catholic priests, John Lennon, chemistry teachers, redheaded men with British accents, librarians, spiders, nature books with photographs of spiders in them, darkness, teachers, swimming pools, smart girls, pretty girls, rich girls, angry girls, tall girls, nice girls, girls with superpowers, giant lizards, blind dates who turn out to have narcolepsy, angry monkeys, feminine hygiene commercials, sitcoms about aliens, things under the bed, contact lenses, ninjas, performances artists, mummies, spontaneous combustion, Soap has been afraid of all of these things at one time or another, Ever since he went to prison, he's realized that he doesn't have to be afraid. All he has to do is come up with a plan. Be prepared. It's just like the Boy Scouts, except you have to be even more prepared. You have to prepare for everything that the Boy Scouts didn't prepare you for, which is pretty much everything.

The earthquake shook us awake, and the tsunami washed away our delusions. It caused us to question our values and our attachment to material possessions. When everything I think of as mine—my belongings, my family, my life—can be swept away in an instant, I have to ask myself, What is real? The wave reminded us that impermanence is real. This is waking up to our true nature. Already broken. Knowing this, we can appreciate each thing as it is, and love each other as we are—completely, unconditionally, without expectation or disappointment. Life is even more beautiful this way, don’t you think?

One by Stewart Stafford Death riding a pale horse, Warned it was time to leave, No hiding place as dice rolled, I sank to my knees to grieve. Six hundred and sixty-six morticians, Greeted the thing from the sea, Scuttling sideways down the road, It headed for Washington D.C. Navel-gazing, not my thing at all, But the Day of Judgement came by, Grabbing my phone lightning-fast, A dying breath to scream goodbye. Firestorms, tsunamis, the dead resurrecting, The sun shattered into nine, Winds that flayed skin from bone, Jester bells at dawn's last shine. © Stewart Stafford, 2022. All rights reserved.

Cilla fought not just as a woman but as the thing she kept at bay. Her adrenaline was off the charts, and her emotions had fluctuated between fear and rage. The ebb and flow felt like a tsunami she was incapable of controlling. The chaos she held on to so tightly was now loose, and the man who unlocked the door was now its victim. Cilla’s magic rose to the surface and erupted in a blinding display of rage.

did not tell me it would hurt like this no one warned me about the heartbreak we experience with friends where are the albums i thought there were no songs sung for it i could not find the ballads or read the books dedicated to writing the grief we fall into when friends leave it is the type of heartache that does not hit you like a tsunami it is a slow cancer the kind that does not show up for months has no visible signs is an ache here a headache there but manageable cancer or tsunami it all ends the same a friend or a lover a loss is a loss is a loss

I think we have two choices in life when somebody we love dearly dies. You either close the curtains and take the pills in the bedroom, or you throw the curtains open. You plant flowers. You light candles. And you try to move on. It’s a very gradual process, and a really painful one, but there’s a will to celebrate the person—and a will to celebrate yourself for having survived. I don’t think of the tsunami every time I look down and see this watch. I think of the course of my life—the memories I have of my dad, the memories I have of Fernando. And also I think a lot about the future. The fact that it was one event, tragic and drastic, but one event in a long chain of events both happy and sad in my life.

with tuk-tuks and rickshaws. While some of the districts were modern and clean, others were colourful and ramshackle. Kiosks selling cigarettes, phonecards, sweets and general supplies lined the streets and traders piled fruit and vegetables on sheets to sell. The highway to the south took us through the main commercial district, Galle Road, which was clean and modern. We headed out down the coast and soon the offices, apartments and shops melted away and were replaced by lush forest on one side and blue white-tipped ocean on the other. An hour away from the city we found a quiet little village on a bay of golden sand. We’d read about some beach houses there which were available for rent and we asked the driver to stop so Mum and Dad could have a look. We were all tired and looking forward to relaxing and having a meal. The place was ideal. Like many of the tourist areas in Sri Lanka, the accommodation was right on the beach, where land was more valuable. There was a house big enough for us all and nearby restaurants and bars, but in a family-friendly location. We booked in for a night. Our parents never initially paid for more than one night’s accommodation when we went somewhere new in case there was a nightclub or building site next door that the guides had failed to mention.

Dedication To all the Dicks and Janes In the mighty tsunami Of Baby boomers Who never gave up or in And surfed to the Far Shore With hearty love of Good Times And a Faith in Holding On For a better Wave to ride For All.

She’d often thought of her late Ma as she wandered around the low-rent offices, efficiently cleaning each one with its drab kaleidoscopic decor of orange and brown. Her family home, like everybody else’s, was decorated like this until the tsunami of black ash and chrome swept them into the history books.

At the White House, President Collins took a call from Governor Hunt of California, “Mr. President, we have a disaster here in California. San Francisco was wiped out by a tsunami and a 9.5 earthquake. There are no survivors,” “I’m sorry to hear that. When did it happen?” “Thirty minutes ago,” “Was there any warnings at all?” “None. I need you to declare it a federal disaster area, sir,” “I’m not going to do that, Governor,” “Why not?” Hunt couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “The election is less than a week from now, so I need all the votes I can get. San Francisco has been useful to me, since the residents there make up most of my base, so to declare it a federal disaster area and all citizens killed will not get me the votes I need. I will simply purge the story from the media, you won’t acknowledge it happened, and any story that leaks out about it, the person who leaks it will be severely punished.

Suddenly, a light from heaven burned down upon the two angels and they were gone, translated up to heaven. • • • • • All along the Valley of Siddim, the long, gigantic rift began to spasm. Large fractures opened in the crust. Massive amounts of heat and gas escaped into the air. The land rolled like a tsunami wave of earth. Up above, lightning joined the thunder in the black heap of cumulus storm clouds.

In mere moments, the armed guards were dead, the nobles were dead, and all of Nimrod’s potential rivals had been purged in a river of blood. In mere moments, Nimrod had consolidated and secured his absolute power through a swift and mighty show of force, sorcery and bloodshed. He breathed a sigh of great accomplishment. Nimrod was indeed potentate of all the land. Semiramis was his queen. But now, he must rally the mob or find himself overrun by a tsunami of humanity awash in fear and panic. He was never one to let a crisis go to waste. He pronounced with an amplified voice of authority, “My people, fear not! My children! You are safe! No more harm will come!” It was amazing. The milling and cries of anxiety stilled. His delivery carried across the hundreds of acres of land as if it were the amplified voice of deity. “I regret what I had to do to the rich and powerful, but it was necessary for your good! This privileged upper class, these fat aristocrats who exploit you for their own benefit will do so no longer!” The crowd began to rumble agreeably.

In a 2016 book widely publicized in the US, Stern claimed that 58 per cent of all jobs would be automated eventually, driven by the ethos of shareholder value. He told the American media group Bloomberg, ‘It’s not like the fall of the auto and steel industries. That hit just a sector of the country. This will be widespread. People will realize that we don’t have a storm anymore; we have a tsunami.’16 Nevertheless, there are reasons to be sceptical about the prospect of a jobless or even workless future. It is the latest version of the ‘lump of labour fallacy’, the idea that there is only a certain amount of labour and work to be done, so that if more of it can be automated or done by intelligent robots, human workers will be rendered redundant. In any case, very few jobs can be automated in their entirety. The suggestion in a much-cited study17 that nearly half of all US jobs are vulnerable to automation has been challenged by, among others, the OECD, which puts the figure of jobs ‘at risk’ at 9 per cent for industrialized countries.18

Every day struck with tsunami force, and only by running full speed did I think I could outwit the daily violence[...] But to run is eventually to run out of breath. Soon I realized that life was not ever going to slow for me -- that I would have to slow for it. Slowing, in fact, would be my only hope of living life, not simply surviving it. And so, in one of the most improbably seasons of my life, I started practicing sabbath, nudged toward the discipline of rest by Gordon Macdonald's book Ordering Your Private World. "If my private world is in order," writes MacDonald, "it will be because I have chosen to press Sabbath peace into the rush and routine of my daily life in order to find the rest God prescribed for himself and all of humanity." As the mother of three young children, I gave up, for one day of the week, the rush to get ahead. The alternative felt like death.

Yo mama so fat… a. …that when she got in the ocean there was a tsunami

As I was doing this, I was also reading the book that Charlotte Clingstone had selected from Horace's library and left for me, Candide-- her cafe's namesake. It was, unexpectedly, a screwball action comedy. The hapless main character, whose name was Candide, travelled with a band of companions from Europe to the New World and back. Along the way, characters were flogged, ship-wrecked, enslaved and nearly executed several times. There were earthquakes and tsunamis and missing body parts. One of Candide's companions, Pangloss, whose name I recognized from the hundred-dollar adjective he inspired-- I'd never known the etymology-- insisted throughout that all their misfortunes were for the best, for they delivered the companions into situations that seemed, at first, pretty good. Until those situations, too, went to shit. The story concluded on a small farm outside Istanbul, where Candide plunked a hoe into the dirt and declared his intention to retreat from adventure (and suffering) and simply tend his garden. The way the author told it-- the book was written in 1959-- it was clear I was supposed to think Candide had finally discovered something important.