Unlikely Movie Quotes

You see, unlike in the movies, there is no THE END sign flashing at the end of books. When I've read a book, I don't feel like I've finished anything. So I start a new one.

I think when you become a parent you go from being a star in the movie of your own life to the supporting player in the movie of someone else's.

You can't have an ending. It's impossible. Because unlike in the movies, life goes on. You're never at the end until you die.

Reading, for me, is like this: consumptive, pleasing, calming, as much as edifying. It's how I feel after a good dinner. That's why I do it so often: It feels wonderful. The book is mind and I insert myself into it, cover it entire, ear my way through every last slash and dot. That's something you can do with a book, unlike television or movies or the Internet. You can eat it, or mark it, like a dog does on a hydrant.

One of the reasons I became a writer is that, unlike starting a band, directing movies, or acting in a theatrical production, you can do it alone. Your success and failure depend entirely on yourself.

I found out it is just as hard to make a movie that you are not proud of as it is to make one you love.

The trouble with life is that, unlike movies, it doesn't have background music. We never know how we're supposed to feel.

books, i think, are a different kind of time machine. instead of reminding you of a lost world, they create one for you. more personal, more intimate-unlike movies, say, the world you experience while reading a book has been lived and envisioned entirely from the INSIDE, and its contours are yours alone.

In a way, what Tarantino has done with the French New Wave and with David Lynch is what Pat Boone did with rhythm and blues: He's found (ingeniously) a way to take what is ragged and distinctive and menacing about their work and homogenize it, churn it until it's smooth and cool and hygienic enough for mass consumption. Reservoir Dogs, for example, with its comically banal lunch chatter, creepily otiose code names, and intrusive soundtrack of campy pop from decades past, is a Lynch movie made commercial, i.e., fast, linear, and with what was idiosyncratically surreal now made fashionably (i.e., "hiply") surreal [...] D. Lynch is an exponentially better filmmaker than Q. Tarantino. For, unlike Tarantino, D. Lynch knows that an act of violence in an American film has, through repetition and desensitization, lost the ability to refer to anything but itself. A better way to put what I just tried to say: Quentin Tarantino is interested in watching somebody's ear getting cut off; David Lynch is interested in the ear.

Gillette--The best a man can get." I stared at the screen. What happened to me? I was meant to be one of those guys, vigorous and athletic and successful and, most of all, American. I was going to walk on the moon, be a movie star or a rock got or a comedian. I was going to have an amazing life and kids with Helen and die like Chaplin a thousand years from now in my Beverly Hills mansion surrounded by my adoring family, with the grieving world media standing by. Instead, I was just another show-business mediocrity. A drunk who shat his pants and ran for help. My life had been careless and selfish. Pleasure in the moment was my only thought, my solitary motivation. I had disappointed whoever had been foolish enough to love me, and left them scarred. I was a very long way from being the best a man can get.

Hollywood's Studio Era was part of a Golden Age because it didn't need profanity (unlike reality-television today)

It was like a dream, where the most unlikely person can’t get enough of you- a movie star or someone’s husband. How can this be? But the attraction is mutual and undeniable; it is the reason for itself.

After Elsa’s death, Einstein established a routine that as the years passed varied less and less. Breakfast between 9 and 10 was followed by a walk to the institute. After working until 1pm he would return home for lunch and a nap. Afterwards he would work in his study until dinner between 6.30 and 7pm. If not entertaining guests, he would return to work until he went to bed between 11 and 12. He rarely went to the theatre or to a concert, and unlike Bohr, hardly ever watched a movie. He was, Einstein said in 1936, ‘living in the kind of solitude that is painful in one’s youth but in one’s more mature years is delicious’.

The fault in our stars is the inability to see that the world falls in love with fantasy, fairytales and magic in movies. Even religion asks us to believe in the most unlikely of situations. However, despite all the great movies we love, we choose to see so many real life spiritual experiences as delusion, mania, psychosis or wishful thinking. Our society gives great devotion to the arts. However, they solve so many problems with realism, rather than giving into the possibilty of God's plan for a person, that doesn't involve their theological views about how God helps write his children's stories.

Here’s how Andreas Schleicher, who directs those PISA tests, puts it: “The best way to find out whether what students have learned at school matters for their life is to actually watch what happens to them after they leave school.

On my website there's a quote from the writer Anthony Burgess: "The greatest gift is the passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind." I've always found that inspiring because the written word, as an art form, is unlike any other: movies, TV, music, they're shared experiences, but books aren't like that. The relationship between a writer and a reader is utterly unique to those two individuals. The world that forms in your head as you read a book will be slightly different to that experienced by every other reader. Anywhere. Ever. Reading is very personal, a communication from one mind to another, something which can't be exactly copied, or replicated, or directly shared. If I read the work of, say, one of the great Victorian novelists, it's like a gift from the past, a momentary connection to another's thoughts. Their ideas are down on paper, to be picked up by me, over a century later. Writers can speak individually to readers across a year, or ten years, or a thousand. That's why I love books.

Did you know that a mind full of malice and hate is able to actually attack another's body and mind? Thus preventing good from taking place (or at least delaying and disrupting the good)? It's true, and we can call it a "psi-attack" or simply an attack from negativism. The way to overcome these forms of attacks is through cultivating a true Positive Soul through the energy of Love. The Love Nature of your Soul is powerful enough to counteract such attacks, because that positive energy forms a blanket around you. Real life isn't much unlike the movies, aside from the fact that in real life, these things truly affect your life immensely, unlike sitting down in a cinema. The vampires of the world are those who can in fact launch massive psi-attacks on whoever they focus their negative energies onto, and for whatever reasons that may be.

The unindividualized, shifting mass of everyone else would be a screen, distributed throughout the city, onto which he'd project the movie of his uninterrupted imagination. Because he'd appear to, and be able to pretend he was, but never actually be a part of the mass, maybe he'd gradually begin to feel a kind of needless intimacy, not unlike being in the same room as a significant other and feeling affection without touching or speaking.

Books, I think, are a different kind of time machine. Instead of reminding you of a lost world, they create one for you. More personal, more intimate - unlike movies, say, the world you experience while reading a book has been lived and envisioned entirely from the INSIDE, and its contours are yours alone.

It wasn't the movies that caused the metamorphosis. It was just the simple act of caring.

It was a kiss perfect in length and pressure and emotion, but unlike in the movies it didn’t make everything all better.

Somtimes the things that seem unlikely to happening life do actually happen.

We go to the movies to enter a new, fascinating world, to inhabit vicariously another human being who at first seems so unlike us and yet at heart is like us,

Unlike modern films where superstars dominate every scene, the Hollywood films of the golden era have depth in writing and casting, so the story can resonate with more than one tone.

You don't look like a princess at all. You look like the more beautiful stepsister in a Disney movie. The underdog who gets the prince at the end. The one who wasn't born with the title, but earned it.

Why don’t the entertainment industry and religious institutions support more songs, books, movies praising friendship? Because friendship, unlike marriage, offers no capital to church, state, and corporation.

Blonde movie stars in the 1950s seem to have been pretty much divided between breathy bombshells (Marilyn Monroe, Jayne Mansfield) and slim, elegant swans (Grace Kelly, Eva Marie Saint). Producers didn’t really know what to do with Judy Holliday, a brilliant, versatile actress who simply didn’t fit into any easy category. Though she left behind a handful of delightful films, one can’t help feeling a sense of waste that her gifts were not better handled by Hollywood (or, for that matter, by Broadway). Perhaps, like Lucille Ball, Judy Holliday would have blossomed with a really good sitcom; but, unlike Lucy, she never got one.

We go to the movies to enter a new, fascinating world, to inhabit vicariously another human being who at first seems so unlike us and yet at heart is like us, to live in a fictional reality that illuminates our daily reality.

what’s terribly pernicious about a lot of movies, is that they make the bad guys wholly unlike you. They turn them into cartoons. That you can feel superior to. Instead of making you realize that there’s part of the villain in all of us.

But unlike the person with exquisite taste in painting or perfume, the movie nerd is classless as well. Grasping the genius of Russ Meyer or George Romero or Herschell Gordon Lewis carries no cultural cachet and gets no one laid, believe me.

An alternative — and better — definition of reality can be found by naming some of its components: air, sunlight, wind, water, the motion of waves, the patterns of clouds before a coming storm. These elements, unlike 20th-century office routines, have been here since before life appeared on this planet, and they will continue long after office routines are gone. They are understood by everyone, not just a small segment of a highly advanced society. When considered on purely logical grounds, they are more real than the extremely transitory lifestyles of the modern civilization the depressed ones want to return to.If this is so, then it follows that those who see sailing as an escape from reality have their understanding of sailing and reality backward. Sailing is not an escape, but a return to and a confrontation of a reality from which modern civilization is itself an escape. For centuries, man suffered from the reality of an Earth that was too dark or too hot or too cold for his comfort, and to escape this he invented complex systems of lighting, heating and air conditioning.Sailing rejects these and returns to the old realities of dark and heat and cold. Modern civilization has found radio, television, movies, nightclubs and a huge variety of mechanized entertainment to titillate our senses and help us escape from the apparent boredom of the Earth and the Sun, the wind and the stars. Sailing returns to these ancient realities.

I’m still adjusting my mind to all the earnest God talk I’m hearing at Liberty. From time to time, it still feels like I walked onto the set of a Lifetime movie. But one thing has become clear: these Liberty students have no ulterior motive. They simply can’t contain their love for God. They’re happy to be believers, and they’re telling the world.

All stories are incomplete. Yet in order to construct a viable identity for myself and give meaning to my life, I don’t really need a complete story devoid of blind spots and internal contradictions. To give meaning to my life, a story needs to satisfy just two conditions: first, it must give me some role to play. A New Guinean tribesman is unlikely to believe in Zionism or in Serbian nationalism, because these stories don’t care at all about New Guinea and its people. Like movie stars, humans like only those scripts that reserve an important role for them. Second, whereas a good story need not extend to infinity, it must extend beyond my horizons. The story provides me with an identity and gives meaning to my life by embedding me within something bigger than myself. But there is always a danger that I might start wondering what gives meaning to that ‘something bigger’. If the meaning of my life is to help the proletariat or the Polish nation, what exactly gives meaning to the proletariat or to the Polish nation? There is a story of a man who claimed that the world is kept in place by resting on the back of a huge elephant. When asked what the elephant stands on, he replied “that it stands on the back of a large turtle. And the turtle? On the back of an even bigger turtle. And that bigger turtle? The man snapped and said: ‘Don’t bother about it. From there onwards it’s turtles all the way down.

EVANSTON. And I’m still basically there. All the time. Unlike Eddie Vedder, I can’t get out. I work there, my doctor is there, and even though I technically live within the Chicago city limits, if I need to go to the supermarket or the movies, I always think of the Evanston ones first. It’s a trap. No one ever leaves this place. Not kidding, I see my junior-year English teacher at Starbucks every morning, which is down the block from the bagel shop this dude I graduated with just bought. It’s gross. I gotta grow the fuck up.

There were elements of Mad Men at Newsweek, except that unlike the natty advertising types, journalists were notorious slobs and our two- and three-martini lunches were out of the office, not in...Kevin Buckley, who was hired in 1963, described the Newsweek of the early 1960s as similar to an old movie, with the wisecracking private eye and his Girl Friday. "The 'hubba-hubba' climate was tolerated," he recalled. "I was told the editors would ask the girls to do handstands on their desk. Was there rancor? Yes. But in this climate, a laugh would follow.

Marriage, after all, was the known, not the unknown: the dull dinner party, not the madcap masquerade. It was a set of issues and events that audiences knew all too well offscreen. Unlike the wide-open frontier of the western, offering freedom and adventure, or the lyrical musical, with its fantasy of release through singing and dancing, or the woman's film, with its placing of a marginalized social figure (the woman) at the center of the universe, or the gangster movie, with its violent excitement and obvious sexual freedom, the marriage film had to reflect what moviegoers already had experienced: marriage, in all its boredom and daily responsibilities.

As we strolled, I noticed the soft light and its effect on the buildings around us. Like an aging screen actress shot in soft light to conceal her age lines, this magical twilight softened the avenues of Paris and produced an elegant scene not unlike a movie. Lining the street ahead of us, the buildings were constructed of solid white stone and more than one hundred years old, but all traces of age or dirt were diffused by the twilight, while their classic French architecture was center stage and highlighted. Fifty Parisians, the bluish cobblestones of the sidewalk, glowing neon, and a colorful outdoor flower stand completed the scene in front of us. Overwhelmed and in awe of the setting, I stopped and stared silently ahead.

In New York University media scholar Jay Rosen’s definition, journalism is a report on “what’s going on” in the community with which one identifies but outside the scope of individual experience: what happens in a place where you are not, at a time when you are doing something else. Journalists report on people who are unlike the people you know personally but whom you still consider your countrymen; on the proceedings and decisions of your government; on plays, movies, books, and music that you have not necessarily experienced firsthand but that form the culture in which you live. Journalism is essential to democracy because it creates a sense of shared reality across a city, a state, a nation. Without this shared reality, a public sphere—the term philosopher Jürgen Habermas uses to describe the space where public opinion takes shape—cannot exist.

I can’t make any promises. I have no idea what the future holds and I’ve never been in a monogamous relationship before. And to be clear, that’s what this would be. But I’m not going to tell you that everything will work out all right, because I don’t know that. Unlike my father, I’m not going to make promises I can’t keep. What I can tell you is that I want to spend time with you. I want to find out what side of the bed you like to sleep on. I want to know where that little scar on your inner thigh came from. I want to figure out whether you’re a morning person or a night owl. I want it to be me you ask what dress you should wear on a night out. I want to know how you take your coffee in the morning and what kind of movies make you cry. I want to know everything there is to know about you…and I want you to want all those things, too.” That was the single most romantic thing anyone had ever said to me.

Why would everyone - in both the movie business and the audience - want to avoid the label "marriage"? Marriage was presumably everybody's business. People were either born into one, born outside of one, living in one, living outside of one, trying to woo someone into one, divorced from one, trying to get divorced from one, reading about one, dreaming about one, or just observing one from afar. For most people, it would be the central event - the biggest decision - of their lives. Marriage was the poor man's trip to Paris and the shopgirl's final goal. At the very least, it was a common touchstone. Unlike a fantasy film or a sci-fi adventure, a marriage story didn't have to be explained or defined. Unlike a western or a gangster plot, it didn't have to find a connection to bring a jolt of emotional recognition to an audience. Marriage was out there, free to be used and presented to people who knew what the deal was.

The instruments of murder are as manifold as the unlimited human imagination. Apart from the obvious—shotguns, rifles, pistols, knives, hatchets and axes—I have seen meat cleavers, machetes, ice picks, bayonets, hammers, wrenches, screwdrivers, crowbars, pry bars, two-by-fours, tree limbs, jack handles (which are not “tire irons;” nobody carries tire irons anymore), building blocks, crutches, artificial legs, brass bedposts, pipes, bricks, belts, neckties, pantyhose, ropes, bootlaces, towels and chains—all these things and more, used by human beings to dispatch their fellow human beings into eternity. I have never seen a butler use a candelabrum. I have never seen anyone use a candelabrum! Such recherché elegance is apparently confined to England. I did see a pair of sneakers used to kill a woman, and they left distinctive tread marks where the murderer stepped on her throat and crushed the life from her. I have not seen an icicle used to stab someone, though it is said to be the perfect weapon, because it melts afterward. But I do know of a case in which a man was bludgeoned to death with a frozen ham. Murderers generally do not enjoy heavy lifting—though of course they end up doing quite a bit of it after the fact, when it is necessary to dispose of the body—so the weapons they use tend to be light and maneuverable. You would be surprised how frequently glass bottles are used to beat people to death. Unlike the “candy-glass” props used in the movies, real glass bottles stand up very well to blows. Long-necked beer bottles, along with the heavy old Coca-Cola and Pepsi bottles, make formidable weapons, powerful enough to leave a dent in a wooden two-by-four without breaking. I recall one case in which a woman was beaten to death with a Pepsi bottle, and the distinctive spiral fluting of the bottle was still visible on the broken margins of her skull. The proverbial “lead pipe” is a thing of the past, as a murder weapon. Lead is no longer used to make pipes.

I thought about the aftermath of the 1862 war, when thirty-eight hastily condemned warriors had been hung in Mankato, in the country's largest-ever mass execution. Their bodies were buried in shallow graves and then dug up for study by local doctors, including Dr. Mayo, who kept the body of Cut Nose for his personal examination. I thought about my father losing his teaching job, about his struggle with depression and drinking. About how angry he was that our history was not taught in schools. Instead, we had to battle sports mascots and stereotypes. Movie actors in brownface. Tourists with cameras. Welfare lines. Alcoholism. 'After stealing everything,' he would rage, 'now they want to blame us for it, too.' Social services broke up Native families, sending children like me to white foster parents. Every week, the newspapers ran stories about Indians who rolled their cars while drunk or the rise of crack cocaine on the reservations or somebody's arrest for gang-related crimes. No wonder so many Native kids were committing suicide. But there was so much more to the story of the run. What people didn't see because they chose never to look. Unlike the stone monument in New Ulm, built to memorialize the settlers' loss with angry pride, the Dakhota had created a living, breathing memorial that found healing in prayer and ceremony. What the two monuments shared, however, was remembering. We were all trying to find a way through grief.

The symposium was a closed-doors, synod-style assembly of people who would never have mixed otherwise. My first surprise was to discover that the military people there thought, behaved, and acted like philosophers—far more so than the philosophers we will see splitting hairs in their weekly colloquium in Part Three. They thought out of the box, like traders, except much better and without fear of introspection. An assistant secretary of defence was among us, but had I not known his profession I would have thought he was a practitioner of skeptical empiricism. Even an engineering investigator who had examined the cause of a space shuttle explosion was thoughtful and open-minded. I came out of the meeting realising that only military people deal with randomness with genuine, introspective intellectual honesty—unlike academics and corporate executives using other people's money. This does not show in war movies, where they are usually portrayed as war-hungry autocrats. The people in front of me were not the people who initiate wars. Indeed, for many, the successful defence policy is the one that manages to eliminate potential dangers without war, such as the strategy of bankrupting the Russians through the escalation in defence spending. When I expressed my amazement to Laurence, another finance person who was sitting next to me, he told me that the military collected more genuine intellects and risk thinkers than most if not all other professions. Defence people wanted to understand the epistemology of risk.

Being raised evangelical in the Midwest gave me a personal experience of the phenomenon called “religious fundamentalism.” A story illustrates. When I was a boy in high school, I was interested in a girl from our church. It was an evangelical church, although some might have called it a bit fundamentalist—taking a hard line on cultural issues. But I took a chance and invited her to a movie, which was certainly frowned upon back then in our church culture (though my own parents snuck us out to Walt Disney movies at the drive-in, where we were unlikely to be spotted). I chose The Sound of Music, thinking it was “safe.” Who could object to Julie Andrews, I confidently thought? I was wrong. As we left the house, my girlfriend’s father stood in the doorway, blocking our exit, and said to his daughter, “If you go to this film, you’ll be trampling on everything that we’ve taught you to believe.” She fled downstairs to her bedroom in tears. We missed the movie, and the evening was a disaster. A year later, the fundamentalist father watched The Sound of Music on his television—and liked it. Fundamentalism is essentially a revolt against modernity. It is a reaction usually based on profound fear and defensiveness against “losing the faith.” My girlfriend’s father instinctively knew that his religion should make him different than the world. That is a fair religious point, and to be honest, there is much about modernity that deserves some revolting against. But I wish he had chosen to break with America at the point of its materialism, racism, poverty, or violence. Instead, he chose Julie Andrews.

Philosophy is different from science and from mathematics. Unlike science it doesn't rely on experiments or observation, but only on thought. And unlike mathematics it has no formal methods of proof. It is done just by asking questions, arguing, trying out ideas and thinking of possible arguments against them, and wondering how our concepts really work. The main concern of philosophy is to question and understand common ideas that all of us use every day without thinking about them. A historian may ask what happened at some time in the past, but a philosopher will ask, "What is time?" A mathematician may investigate the relations among numbers, but a philosopher will ask, "What is a number?" A physicist will ask what atoms are made of or what explains gravity, but a philosopher will ask how we can know there is anything outside of our own minds. A psychologist may investigate how children learn a language, but a philosopher will ask, "What makes a word mean anything?" Anyone can ask whether it's wrong to sneak into a movie without paying, but a philosopher will ask, "What makes an action right or wrong?" We couldn't get along in life without taking the ideas of time, number, knowledge, language, right and wrong for granted most of the time; but in philosophy we investigate those things themselves. The aim is to push our understanding of the world and ourselves a bit deeper. Obviously, it isn't easy. The more basic the ideas you are trying to investigate, the fewer tools you have to work with. There isn't much you can assume or take for granted. So philosophy is a somewhat dizzying activity, and few of its results go unchallenged for long.

On the one hand, the creeds do not speak of “the Jews” as responsible for the death of Jesus; he “suffered under” and “was crucified under” Pontius Pilate. On the other hand, the creeds do not mention Jesus’s Judaism at all. With the stress in some churches on Jesus’s divine sonship, the cross, the resurrection, and the redemptory role of saving humanity from sin and death, his historical connection to Judaism gets lost along with his very Jewish message of the kingdom of heaven. The problem is more than one of silence. In the popular Christian imagination, Jesus still remains defined, incorrectly and unfortunately, as “against” the Law, or at least against how it was understood at the time; as “against” the Temple as an institution and not simply against its first-century leadership; as “against” the people Israel but in favor of the Gentiles. Jesus becomes the rebel who, unlike every other Jew, practices social justice. He is the only one to speak with women; he is the only one who teaches nonviolent responses to oppression; he is the only one who cares about the “poor and the marginalized” (that phrase has become a litany in some Christian circles). Judaism becomes in such discourse a negative foil: whatever Jesus stands for, Judaism isn’t it; whatever Jesus is against, Judaism epitomizes the category. No wonder even today Jesus somehow looks “different” from “the Jews”: in the movies and artistic renderings, he’s blond and they are swarthy; he is cute and buff and they need rhinoplasty and Pilates. Jesus and his followers such as Peter and Mary Magdalene become identified as (proto-) Christian; only those who chose not to follow him remain “Jews.

When Musk took delivery of his F1, CNN was there to cover it. “Just three years ago I was showering at the Y and sleeping on the office floor,” he told the camera sheepishly, “and now obviously, I’ve got a million-dollar car… it’s just a moment in my life.” While other McLaren F1 owners around the world—the sultan of Brunei, Wyclef Jean, and Jay Leno, among others—could comfortably afford it, Musk’s purchase had put a sizable dent in his bank account. And unlike other owners, Musk drove the car to work—and declined to insure it. As Musk drove Thiel up Sand Hill Road in the F1, the car was the subject of their chat. “It was like this Hitchcock movie,” Thiel remembered, “where we’re talking about the car for fifteen minutes. We’re supposed to be preparing for the meeting—and we’re talking about the car.” During their ride, Thiel looked at Musk and reportedly asked, “So, what can this thing do?” “Watch this,” Musk replied, flooring the accelerator and simultaneously initiating a lane change on Sand Hill Road. In retrospect, Musk admitted that he was outmatched by the F1. “I didn’t really know how to drive the car,” he recalled. “There’s no stability systems. No traction control. And the car gets so much power that you can break the wheels free at even fifty miles an hour.” Thiel recalls the car in front of them coming fast into view—then Musk swerving to avoid it. The McLaren hit an embankment, was tossed into the air—“like a discus,” Musk remembered——then slammed violently into the ground. “The people that saw it happen thought we were going to die,” he recalled. Thiel had not worn a seat belt, but astonishingly, neither he nor Musk were hurt. Musk’s “work of art” had not fared as well, having now taken a distinctly cubist turn. Post-near-death experience, Thiel dusted himself off on the side of the road and hitchhiked to the Sequoia offices, where he was joined by Musk a short while later. X.com’s CEO, Bill Harris, was also waiting at the Sequoia office, and he recalled that both Thiel and Musk were late but offered no explanation for their delay. “They never told me,” Harris said. “We just had the meeting.” Reflecting on it, Musk found humor in the experience: “I think it’s safe to say Peter wouldn’t be driving with me again.” Thiel wrung some levity out of the moment, too. “I’d achieved lift-off with Elon,” he joked, “but not in a rocket.

The Deliverator's car has enough potential energy packed into its batteries to fire a pound of bacon into the Asteroid Belt. Unlike a bimbo box or a Burb beater, the Deliverator's car unloads that power through gaping, gleaming, polished sphincters. When the Deliverator puts the hammer down, shit happens. You want to talk contact patches? Your car's tires have tiny contact patches, talk to the asphalt in four places the size of your tongue. The Deliverator's car has big sticky tires with contact patches the size of a fat lady's thighs. The Deliverator is in touch with the road, starts like a bad day, stops on a peseta. Why is the Deliverator so equipped? Because people rely on him. He is a role model. This is America. People do whatever the fuck they feel like doing, you got a problem with that? Because they have a right to. And because they have guns and no one can fucking stop them. As a result, this country has one of the worst economies in the world. When it gets down to it -- talking trade balances here -- once we've brain-drained all our technology into other countries, once things have evened out, they're making cars in Bolivia and microwave ovens in Tadzhikistan and selling them here -- once our edge in natural resources has been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and dirigibles that can ship North Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel -- once the Invisible Hand has taken all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani brickmaker would consider to be prosperity -- y'know what? There's only four things we do better than anyone else: * music * movies * microcode (software) * high-speed pizza delivery The Deliverator used to make software. Still does, sometimes. But if life were a mellow elementary school run by well-meaning education Ph.D.s, the Deliverator's report card would say: "Hiro is so bright and creative but needs to work harder on his cooperation skills." So now he has this other job. No brightness or creativity involved -- but no cooperation either. Just a single principle: The Deliverator stands tall, your pie in thirty minutes or you can have it free, shoot the driver, take his car, file a class-action suit. The Deliverator has been working this job for six months, a rich and lengthy tenure by his standards, and has never delivered a pizza in more than twenty-one minutes.

Davy, ever the daring one, bought a jumbo peppermint milk shake and got fifty cents back. He talked me out of getting plain vanilla. “You can get plain vanilla anytime!” he said. “Try…” He scanned the chalkboard that listed all the flavors. “Try peanut butter!” I did. I have never been sorry, because it was the best milk shake I ever tasted, like a melted and frozen Reese’s cup. And then it happened. We were walking across the parking lot, under the burning sun, with our shakes freezing our hands in the big white paper cups that had Spinnin’ Wheel in red across the sides. A sound began: music, first from a few car radios and then others as teenaged fingers turned the dial to that station. The volume dials were cranked up, and the music flooded out from the tinny speakers into the bright summer air. In a few seconds the same song was being played from every radio on the lot, and as it played, some of the car engines started and revved up and young laughter flew like sparks. I stopped. Just couldn’t walk anymore. That music was unlike anything I’d ever heard: guys’ voices, intertwining, breaking apart, merging again in fantastic, otherworldly harmony. The voices soared up and up like happy birds, and underneath the harmony was a driving drumbeat and a twanging, gritty guitar that made cold chills skitter up and down my sunburned back. “What’s that, Davy?” I said. “What’s that song?” …Round…round…get around…wha wha wha-oooooo… “What’s that song?” I asked him, close to panic that I might never know. “Haven’t you heard that yet? All the high-school guys are singin’ it.” …Gettin’ bugged drivin’ up and down the same ol’ strip…I gotta find a new place where the kids are hip… “What’s the name of it?” I demanded, standing at the center of ecstasy. “It’s on the radio all the time. It’s called—” Right then the high-school kids in the lot started singing along with the music, some of them rocking their cars back and forth, and I stood with a peanut butter milk shake in my hand and the sun on my face and the clean chlorine smell of the swimming pool coming to me from across the street. “—by the Beach Boys,” Davy Ray finished. “What?” “The Beach Boys. That’s who’s singin’ it.” “Man!” I said. “That sounds…that sounds…” What would describe it? What word in the English language would speak of youth and hope and freedom and desire, of sweet wanderlust and burning blood? What word describes the brotherhood of buddies, and the feeling that as long as the music plays, you are part of that tough, rambling breed who will inherit the earth? “Cool,” Davy Ray supplied. It would have to do. …Yeah the bad guys know us and they leave us alone…I get arounnnnddddd… I was amazed. I was transported. Those soaring voices lifted me off the hot pavement, and I flew with them to a land unknown. I had never been to the beach before. I’d never seen the ocean, except for pictures in magazines and on TV and movies. The Beach Boys. Those harmonies thrilled my soul, and for a moment I wore a letter jacket and owned a red hotrod and had beautiful blondes begging for my attention and I got around.

It is the importance of this quality of generosity in fiction that requires a measure of childishness in the writer. People who have strong mental focus and a sense of purpose in their lives, people who have respect for all that grownups generally respect (earning a good living, the flag, the school system, those who are richer than oneself, those who are beloved and famous, such as movie stars), are unlikely ever to make it through the many revisions it takes to tell a story beautifully, without visible tricks, nor would they be able to tolerate the fame and fortune of those who tell stories stupidly, with hundreds of tricks, all of them old and boring to the discriminating mind. First, with his stubborn churlishness the good writer scoffs at what the grownups are praising, then, with his childish forgetfulness and indifference to what sensible people think, he goes back to his foolish pastime, the making of real art.

Quantum theory has unfortunately become a catch-all phrase for trying to prove various kinds of New Age nonsense. It’s unlikely that the authors of the many books making wacky claims of time travel or mind control, and who use quantum theory as “proof ” have the slightest knowledge of physics or could explain even the rudiments of quantum theory. The popular 2004 film, What the Bleep Do We Know? is a good case in point. The movie starts out claiming quantum theory has revolutionized our thinking—which is true enough—but then, without explanation or elaboration, goes on to say that it proves people can travel into the past or “choose which reality you want.” Quantum theory says no such thing. Quantum theory deals with probabilities, and the likely places particles may appear, and likely actions they will take. And while, as we shall see, bits of light and matter do indeed change behavior depending on whether they are being observed, and measured particles do indeed amazingly appear to influence the past behavior of other particles, this does not in any way mean that humans can travel into their past or influence their own history.

unlike in the movies, there is no THE END sign flashing at the end of books. When I’ve read a book, I don’t feel like I’ve finished anything. So I start a new one.

Jack Webb had been active in radio for several years before Dragnet propelled him to national prominence. He had arrived at KGO, the ABC outlet in San Francisco, an unknown novice in 1945. Soon he was working as a staff announcer and disc jockey. His morning show, The Coffee Club, revealed his lifelong interest in jazz music, and in 1946 he was featured on a limited ABC-West network in the quarter-hour docudrama One out of Seven. His Jack Webb Show, also 1946, was a bizarre comedy series unlike anything else he ever attempted. His major break arrived with Pat Novak: for 26 weeks Webb played a waterfront detective in a series so hard-boiled it became high camp. He moved to Hollywood, abandoning Novak just as that series was hitting its peak. Mutual immediately slipped him into a Novak sound-alike, Johnny Modero: Pier 23, for the summer of 1947. He played leads and bit parts on such series as Escape, The Whistler, and This Is Your FBI. He began a film career: in He Walked by Night (1948), Webb played a crime lab cop. The film’s technical adviser was Sergeant Marty Wynn of the Los Angeles police. Webb and Wynn shared a belief that pure investigative procedure was dramatic enough without the melodrama of the private eye. The seeds of Dragnet were sown on a movie set.

Evgeny Morozov, the most bracing critic of modern optimism, emphasizes the anaesthetizing effects of perpetual amusement. People use new means of communication not to engage in political activism, but to find entertainment. The Net is no exception, and has increased the opportunities for the masses to find pleasing diversions to a level that no one had previously imagined possible. In Russia, China, Vietnam and the other formerly puritan communist countries, the decision by the new market-orientated regimes to allow Western-style media to provide high-quality escapism, sport, dating and gossip sites was a smart move that made their control of the masses more effective. In Belarus, Morozov discovered Internet service providers that were offering free downloads of pirated movies and music. The dictatorship ‘could easily put an end to such practices, [but] prefers to look the other way and may even be encouraging them’. Unlike so many who write about the Net, Morozov was brought up in a dictatorship – Belarus, as it happens – and the knowledge that freedom is hard to win explains his impatience with wishful thinking.

In the early 1950s the Brattle Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts, tried something old. Like many another venue for productions of Shakespeare, Chekhov, and Shaw, the Brattle had become a film house in the early 1950s. But it was a film house unlike any other. It had a rear-screen projector, rather than the standard setup that beamed movies on a screen above the audience. And it had owners who believed that the past could be more alluring than the present.

As kids got older, the parental involvement that seemed to matter most was different but related. All over the world, parents who discussed movies, books, and current affairs with their kids had teenagers who performed better in reading. Here again, parents who engaged their kids in conversation about things larger than themselves were essentially teaching their kids to become thinking adults. Unlike volunteering in schools, those kinds of parental efforts delivered clear and convincing results, even across different countries and different income levels.

Unlike in the movies, the weather seemed indifferent to his personal predicament and refused dramatic contribution. It was a rather pleasant day, in fact.

Comic shops were present for the birth and the death of video stores. They lived through the fall and gradual revival of record stores. Their market continues its unlikely growth across the board and is currently the dominant first medium for cross-platform exploitation. Several top-rated TV shows were once something you could buy only in a comic shop. Many top movies can be traced to a collectible back issue. There are even comics taken seriously as art, a notion that at one time seemed more quixotic than any superhero’s quest. Comic shops have been there for those comics, too.

Once I got past grief, depression, and resignation, I needed help identifying other types of sad feelings. But unlike my exploration of anger, the thesaurus wasn’t much help this time. I added a few more words to the constellation, but I’m not sure how strongly I experience any of them. Sadness feels like a diffuse emotion, more of a background state of being than a tangible feeling. I’m rarely actively sad. I don’t burst into tears when I hear sad news. The last time I cried at a movie, I was 12. The only book that ever made me tear up was A Prayer for Owen Meany. More than once I’ve sat stoically immobile beside someone I love while they broke down. My sadness is all undercurrent, twisted up inside me, unable to escape to the surface. This, of course, makes me look cold and unfeeling. The stereotypical emotionless Aspie. The first time I confronted my muted sadness was in high school. A girl in my class, Karen, was killed in a car accident. The entire junior class attended her funeral, and everyone sobbed from beginning to end. Except me.

unlike in the movies, propellers don’t dice up the bad guy to end the fight then keep on spinning like nothing happened. 

The basic point of all the scientific ideas we threw at you is that there is a lot of disagreement about how the flow of time works and how or whether one thing causes another. If you take home one idea out of all of these, make it that the everyday feeling that the future has no effect on the present is not necessarily true. As a result of the current uncertainty about time and causality in philosophical and scientific circles, it is not at all unreasonable to talk in a serious way about the possibility of genuine precognition. We also hope that our brief mention of spirituality has opened your mind to the idea that there may be a spiritual perspective as well. Both Theresa and Julia treasure the spiritual aspects of precognition, because premonitions can act as reminders that there may be an eternal part of us that exists outside of time and space. There may well be a scientific explanation for this eternal part, and if one is found, science and spirituality will become happy partners. Much of Part 2 will be devoted to the spiritual and wellbeing components of becoming a Positive Precog, and we will continue to marry those elements with scientific research as we go. 1 Here, physics buffs might chime in with some concerns about the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Okay, physics rock stars! As you know, the Second Law states that in a closed system, disorder is very unlikely to decrease – and as such, you may believe this means that there is an “arrow of time” that is set by the Second Law, and this arrow goes in only the forward direction. As a result, you might also think that any talk of a future event influencing the past is bogus. We would ask you to consider four ideas. 2 Here we are not specifically talking about closed timelike curves, but causal loops in general. 3 For those concerned that the idea of messages from the future suggests such a message would be travelling faster than the speed of light, a few thoughts: 1) “message” here is used colloquially to mean “information” – essentially a correlation between present and future events that can’t be explained by deduction or induction but is not necessarily a signal; 2) recently it has been suggested that superluminal signalling is not actually prohibited by special relativity (Weinstein, S, “Superluminal signaling and relativity”, Synthese, 148(2), 2006: 381–99); and 3) the no-signalling theorem(s) may actually be logically circular (Kennedy, J B, “On the empirical foundations of the quantum no-signalling proofs”, Philosophy of Science, 62(4), 1995: 543–60.) 4 Note that in the movie Minority Report, the future was considered set in stone, which was part of the problem of the Pre-Crime Programme. However, at the end of the movie it becomes clear that the future envisioned did not occur, suggesting the idea that futures unfold probabilistically rather than definitely.

There comes a time in every story when the hero finally gets everything they ever wanted. And that's usually when the music swells and the credits roll or the last page turns or we just flip the channel. I believe there's a reason for that. We don't want to spend too much time with somebody once they've gotten everything they've ever wanted. They become insufferable. They become unsympathetic. They start using words like whom properly in a sentence. There's no more mountain left for them to climb, so we're out. We're underdog people. Get out of here with your all my dream already came true nonsense. Just take your football and go home, Rudy. Go live your happy life and let us be. We're already on to the next unlikely story. But what if success was where the real trouble began? What if we got everything we ever wanted, only to find out it doesn't change a thing about not liking this skin we have to do life in, this dirt still caked under our fingernails. That once we go home and tuck ourselves between the cool cotton sheets, where it's just us and the darkness settled in, it hasn't changed a thing about how easily we can lay our head down and fall asleep at night. ... The hero, it turns out, is flawed. Deeply, deeply, deeply flawed. And no amount of success is going to undo that. No relentless pursuit of more is going to erase what was missing. It's going to take digging in and doing the hard work of healing if there's any hope of changing all that. but how do e you gather up the nerve when it already feels so damaged? And is that the kind of story anybody will ever care about? ... We don't really make movies about what happened after someone got everything they ever wanted. About what happens when the hero at last has to come face-to-face with what no amount of success will ever fix. But that's the story we're living now.

The Keeling Curve is a useful reality check, one that cuts through all the noise and confusion of the climate and energy debates. Unlike the slopes of the huge volcano on which it is measured, the initially gentle upward curve gets steeper the higher you go. That means that the rate of CO2 accumulation in the atmosphere is steadily increasing, from roughly 1 ppm in the early years to about 2 ppm annually today. There is no visible slowdown, no sudden downwards blip, to mark the implementation of the Kyoto Protocol, still less 2009’s Copenhagen ‘two degrees’ commitment or the landmark Paris Agreement of 2015. All those smiling heads of state shaking hands, the diplomats hugging on the podium after marathon sessions of all-night negotiating – none of that actually made any identifiable difference to the Keeling Curve, which is the only thing that actually matters to the planet’s temperature. All our solar panels, wind turbines, electric cars, lithium-ion batteries, LED lightbulbs, nuclear plants, biogas digesters, press conferences, declarations, pieces of paper; all our shouting and arguing, weeping and marching, reporting and ignoring, decrying and denying; all our speeches, movies, websites, lectures and books; our announcements, carbon-neutral targets, moments of joy and despair; none of these to date have so much as made the slightest dent in the steepening upward slope of the Keeling Curve.

I’ve devoured every serial killer-based film and series I can, read the biographies, listened to hours of true crime podcasts, watched intensely questionable YouTube videos and every new Netflix true crime documentary. I’ve rewatched The Silence of the Lambs every year, as my own sort of holiday classic, and if stressed out, I’ll turn to Zodiac as my comfort blanket movie. I see it as a safe peek inside a psychology so far removed from my life, so totally inconceivable morally, that it’s the cinematic equivalent of bungee jumping.

Your lack of work is not making me resentful, my lack of rest is making me resentful. I remember the moment I saw resentment in another person and thought "Oh no, she's so unlikable. So awful. But so painfully relatable. I don't want to be that person" Home for the Holidays movie

These conditions commonly coexist with ADHD: Obstructive sleep apnea: This sleep disorder, characterized by snoring and pauses in breathing during sleep, is more common among adults, but it does occur in children, especially children with ADHD. Restless leg syndrome: This condition causes an intense, often irresistible urge to move your legs, particularly when sitting or lying down. Unlike ADHD-related hyperactivity, it happens mostly at night and often gets worse with age. Periodic limb movement syndrome: You know how your leg kicks or your arm flops all of a sudden when you’re falling asleep? It has a name. At least, it does when it keeps happening every twenty to forty seconds and long enough to interfere with sleep.[*3] Sleepwalking and night terrors: These sleep disorders occur when the lines between awake and asleep are blurred. They are often first observed in childhood by parents. Insomnia: You’ve probably heard of this one. Insomnia occurs whenever you want to sleep but can’t sleep, due to difficulties falling asleep or staying asleep, and it is also one of the criteria for delayed sleep phase syndrome. Delayed sleep phase syndrome: This syndrome occurs when your body’s internal clock, or its circadian rhythm, is delayed by two or more hours. For example, you might naturally want to sleep from three a.m. to noon. Excessive daytime sleepiness: This condition is exactly what it sounds like. If you’re falling asleep in the middle of a movie at your friend’s house or missing a shift because you can’t stay awake, it doesn’t mean you’re a bad friend or a lazy employee. It could be a sign that something is wrong.

By our seventh anniversary, we had five kids and weren’t done yet. Raven was blessed with easy pregnancies and could run around until the moment of delivery. Oh, and did those deliveries become legend. When River was born, the whole crew was laughing their asses off in the waiting room because of Raven’s profanity-laced rants. Our twins came two years later. During their deliveries, a drinking game started with the crew and club guys. Every time Raven screamed a cuss word, Tucker told the guys at the bar and they’d take a shot of whiskey. Half of the guys were wasted by the time Savannah was born. As Avery joined her sister, the other half of the bar was just as drunk off their asses. The obstetrician nearly begged Raven to use pain meds. She refused of course. No one was telling her what to do. For Maverick’s birth, the hospital moved Raven to a room at the end of the hall and kept the other laboring mothers as far away as possible. Another change the third time around was how Raven refused to allow the club guys free fun based on her laboring pains. To play the drinking game, they had to donate a hundred dollars into the kids’ college fund. We figured at least one of our kids would want to do the education thing. The guys donated the money and got ready for Raven to let loose. In her laboring room, she even allowed a mic connected to overhead speakers at the bar. Despite knowing they were all listening, my woman didn’t disappoint. One particular favorite was motherfucking crustacean cunt. When Maverick’s head crowded, she also sounded a little bit like a graboid from Tremors. Hell, I think she did that on purpose because we’d watched the movie the night before. Raven was a born entertainer. That night, we added a few thousand dollars to the kids’ college fund, the guys had a blast getting wasted to Raven’s profanity, and I welcomed my second son. Unlike his angelic brother, Maverick peed on me an hour after birth. I knew that boy was going to be a handful.

Well, that was elegant. Way to run into the door, like in some slapstick movie, as the hottest man you’ve ever seen in your life looks on with lust-filled eyes after kissing you unlike you’ve ever been kissed before. I

New opportunities for New York as a high-tech hub are related to the evolution of the Internet, according to Chris Dixon: “Imagine the Internet as a house. The first phase— laying the foundation, the bricks—happened in the ‘90s. No wonder that Boston and California, heavy tech places with MIT and Stanford, dominated the scene at that time. The house has been built, now it’s more about interior design. Many interesting, recent companies haven’t been started by technologists but by design and product-oriented people, which has helped New York a lot. New York City has always been a consumer media kind of city, and the Internet is in need of those kinds of skills now. Actually, when I say design, it’s more about product-focused people. I’d put Facebook in that category. Everything requires engineers, but unlike Google, their breakthrough was not as scientific. It was a well-designed product that people liked to use. Google had a significant scientific breakthrough with their search algorithm. That’s not what drives Facebook. In The Social Network movie, when they write equations on the wall that’s just not what it is, it’s not about that. Every company has engineering problems, but Facebook is product-design driven.

Unlike the scary movies and sermons from my youth, not one of them focuses on personal salvation as a way of escaping hell in the afterlife. Rather, they present how the good news about eternity should transform this life. The Christian sees the world as a transitional home badly in need of rehab, and we are active agents in that project.

Anne and I took a train in one day to meet Jamesy Black, a guy she had known in Glasgow. He was a fellow student of hers at the art school and had married an impossibly glamorous American fashion model named Lucy. They lived on Avenue B between Ninth and Tenth streets, which, during the early and mid-1980s, was one of the more dangerous neighborhoods in New York City. We met Jamesy at the Odessa, that wonderful café on Avenue A. I had never been to the East Village before. I thought I’d died and gone to punk-rock heaven. There were Goths and junkies and rockers everywhere, mixed in with the scary street-life people. The whole neighborhood seemed alive with a tangible, cinematic danger. Everywhere I looked was a movie set—there

The Bible’s was an unlikely, movie-set world alongside our world. Light-shot and translucent in the pallid Sunday-school watercolors on the walls, stormy and opaque in the dense and staggering texts they read us placidly, sweet-mouthed and earnest, week after week, this world interleaved our waking world like dream. The

The Bible’s was an unlikely, movie-set world alongside our world. Light-shot and translucent in the pallid Sunday-school watercolors on the walls, stormy and opaque in the dense and staggering texts they read us placidly, sweet-mouthed and earnest, week after week, this world interleaved our waking world like dream.

A perfect conversation, unlike a dance or movie, will come up naturally between the two parties.

Rakesh Roshan Rakesh Roshan is a producer, director, and actor in Bollywood films. A member of the successful Roshan film family, Mr. Roshan opened his own production company in 1982 and has been producing Hindi movies ever since. His film Kaho Naa…Pyaar Hai won nine Filmfare awards, including those for best movie and best director. I didn’t have the privilege of meeting Diana personally, but as a keen observer I learned a lot about her through the media and television coverage of her various activities and her visits to various countries, including India. I vividly remember when she came to my country and visited places that interested her, such as Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity, various homes of the destitute, orphanages, hospitals, and so on. On all of these occasions, her kind looks, kind words, and kind actions, such as holding the poor orphan children in her lap, caring for them with love, and wiping their tears, were sufficient indications to convey the passion that Diana had in her heart for the service of the poor and underprivileged. Wherever she went, she went with such noble mission. She derived a sort of divine pleasure through her visits to charitable institutions, orphanages, and homes of the destitute. By minutely looking at her, one could see a deity in Diana--dedicated to love and kindness--devoted to charity and goodness and the darling of all she met. For such human virtues, love for the poor and concern for the suffering of humanity, Diana commands the immense respect, admiration, and affection of the whole world. Wherever she went, she was received with genuine affection and warmth, unlike politically staged receptions.

So what can we generalize about Victorian vampires? They are already dead, yet not exactly dead, and clammy-handed. They can be magnetically repelled by crucifixes and they don’t show up in mirrors. No one is safe; vampires prey upon strangers, family, and lovers. Unlike zombies, vampires are individualists, seldom traveling in packs and never en masse. Many suffer from mortuary halitosis despite our reasonable expectation that they would no longer breathe. But our vampires herein also differ in interesting ways. Some fear sunlight; others do not. Many are bound by a supernatural edict that forbids them to enter a home without some kind of invitation, no matter how innocently mistaken. Dracula, for example, greets Jonathan Harker with this creepy exclamation that underlines another recurring theme, the betrayal of innocence (and also explains why I chose Stoker’s story “Dracula’s Guest” as the title of this anthology): “Welcome to my house! Enter freely and of your own will.” Yet other vampires seem immune to this hospitality prohibition. One common bit of folklore was that you ought never to refer to a suspected vampire by name, yet in some tales people do so without consequence. Contrary to their later presentation in movies and television, not all Victorian vampires are charming or handsome or beautiful. Some are gruesome. Some are fiends wallowing in satanic bacchanal and others merely contagious victims of fate, à la Typhoid Mary. A few, in fact, are almost sympathetic figures, like the hero of a Greek epic who suffers the anger of the gods. Curious bits of other similar folklore pop up in scattered places. Vampires in many cultures, for example, are said to be allergic to garlic. Over the centuries, this aromatic herb has become associated with sorcerers and even with the devil himself. It protected Odysseus from Circe’s spells. In Islamic folklore, garlic springs up from Satan’s first step outside the Garden of Eden and onion from his second. Garlic has become as important in vampire defense as it is in Italian cooking. If, after refilling your necklace sachet and outlining your window frames, you have some left over, you can even use garlic to guard your pets or livestock—although animals luxuriate in soullessness and thus appeal less to the undead. The vampire story as we know it was born in the early nineteenth century. As

An accurate budget must be built on a base of thorough research. You must do research on your community to find out what it will cost to get a church off the ground. You need to solidly answer questions such as:, What will the cost of living in this community be?, What will my salary be? How about salaries for additional staff?, How much will it cost to rent space for the church to meet in?, How much will it cost to operate a business in this city (office rent, phones, computer equipment, copy equipment, and so on)? Talk with other pastors in the community. Find out what their start-up costs were and what they are currently spending to maintain and operate the church. Other pastors can be a valuable resource for you on many levels. The worst mistake you can make is to start the budget process by viewing economic realities through a rose-colored lens. If you speculate too much or cut corners in this area, you’ll end up paying dearly down the road. Remember, God never intended for you to go it alone. There are people and resources out there to help you prepare. Ask others for help. God receives no glory when you are scraping the bottom to do His work. So don’t think too small. Church planting is an all or nothing venture. You can’t just partially commit. You have to fully commit, and often that means with your wallet. Don’t underestimate the importance of having a base of prayer partners. You need prayers as desperately as you need money. You need prayers as desperately as you need money. An unhealthy launch may occur when a new church begins as the result of a church split, when a planter is disobedient in following God, or when there is a lack of funding or solid strategy. Finding the right teammates to help you on this journey is serious business. The people you bring on to your staff will either propel you down the road toward fulfilling the vision for your church or serve as speed bumps along the way. You should never be afraid to ask potential staff members to join you—even if it means a salary cut, a drastic position change or a significant new challenge for them. When you ask someone to join your staff, you are not asking that person to make a sacrifice. (If you have that mentality, you need to work to change it.) Instead, you are offering that person the opportunity of a lifetime. There are three things that every new church must have before it can be a real church: (1) a lead pastor, (2) a start date, and (3) a worship leader. Hire a person at the part-time level before bringing him or her on full time. When hiring a new staff person, make sure he or she possesses the three C's: Character, Chemistry & Competency Hiring staff precedes growth, not vice versa. Hire slow, fire fast. Never hire staff when you can find a volunteer. Launch as publicly as possible, with as many people as possible. There are two things you are looking for in a start date: (1) a date on which you have the potential to reach as many people as possible, and (2) a date that precedes a period of time in which people, in general, are unlikely to be traveling out of town. You need steppingstones to get you from where you are to your launch date. Monthly services are real services that you begin holding three to six months prior to your launch date. They are the absolute best strategic precursor to your launch. Monthly services give you the invaluable opportunity to test-drive your systems, your staff and, to an extent, even your service style. At the same time, you are doing real ministry with the people in attendance. These services should mirror as closely as possible what your service will look like on the launch date. Let your target demographic group be the strongest deciding factor in settling on a location: Hotel ballrooms, Movie theaters, Comedy clubs, Public-school auditoriums, Performing-arts theaters, Available church meeting spaces, College auditoriums, Corporate conference space.

Unlike the great vampires of the Anne Rice series, The Lost Boys movie or, more recently, True Blood, there is nothing “bad ass” in the least about the Twilight bloodsuckers. In that simpering world, centuries-old vampires mope over 17-year olds, attend high school, and sparkle in the sunlight.

My clearest memory of Ferriday is driving over to sit in the decaying old Arcade theater in 1978, because unlike Natchez’s conservative theaters, the Arcade was showing Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter. To this day, I believe the Arcade owners booked the film because they thought it was a movie about deer hunting, not Vietnam. The Concordia Beacon

I trudged out of my cell and over to the large, thick window to face once more Bernie and his fabulous flying documents—and I stopped dead only halfway there. Because Bernie was nowhere to be seen. Instead, another man sat in his place in the chair on the far side of the glass. He was a man unlike any I have ever seen, outside of the movies. Everything about him seemed to radiate calm assurance, power, and money. He was tanned where Bernie was pale, relaxed and confident instead of hassled, harried, and exhausted, and he was dressed in a suit that was so unlike the poor ill-fitting grubby thing Bernie wore that it cannot really be thought of as the same kind of garment.

I needed to grab another box of screws, but, when I got to the truck, I realized I’d left my wallet in my tool bucket. When I went back ground the house to get it, she had my plans open and was double-checking all my measurements.” Emma’s cheeks burned when Gram laughed at Sean’s story, but, since she couldn’t deny it, she stuck her last bite of the fabulous steak he’d grilled into her mouth. “That’s my Emma,” Gram said. “I think her first words were ‘If you want something done right, do it yourself.’” “In my defense,” she said when she’d swallowed, pointing her fork at Sean for emphasis, “my name is on the truck, and being able to pound nails doesn’t make you a builder. I have a responsibility to my clients to make sure they get quality work.” “I do quality work.” “I know you build a quality deck, but stairs are tricky.” She smiled sweetly at him. “I had to double-check.” “It’s all done but the seating now and it’s good work, even though I practically had to duct tape you to a tree in order to work in peace.” She might have taken offense at his words if not for the fact he was playing footsie with her under the table. And when he nudged her foot to get her to look at him, he winked in that way that—along with the grin—made it almost impossible for her to be mad at him. “It’s Sean’s turn to wash tonight. Emma, you dry and I’ll put away.” “I’ll wash, Gram. Sean can dry.” “I can wash,” Sean told her. “The world won’t come to an end if I wash the silverware before the cups.” “It makes me twitch.” “I know it does. That’s why I do it.” He leaned over and kissed her before she could protest. “That new undercover-cop show I like is on tonight,” Gram said as they cleared the table. “Maybe Sean won’t snort his way through this episode.” He laughed and started filling the sink with hot, soapy water. “I’m sorry, but if he keeps shoving his gun in his waistband like that, he’s going to shoot his…he’s going to shoot himself in a place men don’t want to be shot.” Emma watched him dump the plates and silverware into the water—while three coffee mugs sat on the counter waiting to be washed—but forced herself to ignore it. “Can’t be worse than the movie the other night.” “That was just stupid,” Sean said while Gram laughed. They’d tried to watch a military-action movie and by the time they were fifteen minutes in, she thought they were going to have to medicate Sean if they wanted to see the end. After a particularly heated lecture about what helicopters could and couldn’t do, Emma had hushed him, but he’d still snorted so often in derision she was surprised he hadn’t done permanent damage to his sinuses. “I don’t want you to think that’s real life,” he told them. “I promise,” Gram said, “if I ever want to use a tank to break somebody out of a federal prison, I’ll ask you how to do it correctly first.” Sean kissed the top of her head. “Thanks, Cat. At least you appreciate me, unlike Emma, who just tells me to shut up.” “I’d appreciate you more if there wasn’t salad dressing floating in the dishwater you’re about to wash my coffee cup in.” “According to the official guy’s handbook, if I keep doing it wrong, you’re supposed to let me watch SportsCenter while you do it yourself.” “Did the official guy’s handbook also tell you that if that happens, you’ll also be free to watch the late-night sports show while I do other things myself?

Methuselah, being raised by a godly parent, Enoch (who walked with God and was translated to heaven without death), was surely righteous as well (Hebrews 11:53). His death surely preceded the Flood unlike what is portrayed in the unbiblical movie Noah with Russell Crowe and Darren Aronofsky. Some have suggested that Methuselah died immediately before the Flood and hence a seven-day mourning period was in order. This possibly makes sense of why Noah was given seven days until the Flood came (e.g., Genesis 7:44

I awoke from my physical and mental sickness in 2022. I had changed the body chemistry like those in the movie ‘Awakenings’. In 2024 the ‘Awakening Effect’ started slowly subsiding. Unlike those in the ‘Awakenings’ movie, I was able to adjust the body chemistry and wake up again.

then it was exactly what I needed, for I was still in shock. Unlike the movies, you don’t just leave your home, your marriage and everything you knew and simply start a new life. There is a bit in between where you’re just breathing – like a drowning man who clings to a rock. You know you’re alive, you can move, even speak, but something is missing.

I hid behind a wall and looked inside: there were three adult men getting changed and throwing money around like they were in some Hollywood movie. Shocked and delighted, I couldn’t contain my excitement: ‘Bloody hell, Theo, you’ve found them, you’ve bloody found them!’ I whispered and gave him a stroke, my heart pounding. Theo had found the team of armed robbers. What I was feeling inevitably went down the lead. Theo was whimpering, he was expecting the challenges to be issued, but I couldn’t with so many of them. There was a chance he’d fare okay against three but it was unlikely even with the element of surprise on our side.

Silently, Niki began to cry again, her shoulders hitching the way Amy’s used to when she was fighting back tears. Unlike her mother, Amy was tough, ready to take on anyone or anything. She rarely cried, and when she did, she tried to hold it back. Sharon, on the other hand, teared up during television Christmas movies and when reading, especially sad novels and touching greeting cards. She had a gift for crying, was a natural,

The farm, unlike the highway, was a community, with the only intimation that it might not survive coming in the arrival of a college-educated daughter, “smart, well-dressed, confident, blooming with health and energy, . . . a breath of air from another world.” It seemed unlikely that she would wind up on the farm: the city, “at once so menacing and so promising,” had claimed her for its own. George saw the future himself when he spent the next night in a college town where the streets were empty except for automobiles, each containing a couple or two “bent on pleasure—usually vicarious pleasure—in the form of a movie or a dance or a petting party.” Anyone unlucky enough not to be among these “private, mathematically correct companies” would be alone. “There was no place where strangers would come together freely—as in a Bavarian beer hall or a Russian amusement park—for the mere purpose of being together and enjoying new acquaintances. Even the saloons were nearly empty.” All of this convinced George that the technology industrialization had made possible—automobiles, movies, radio, mass-circulation magazines, the advertising that paid for them—was creating an exaggerated desire for privacy. It was making an English upper-class evil a vice of American society. This was the sad climax of individualism, the blind-alley of a generation which had forgotten how to think or live collectively, of a people whose private lives were so brittle, so insecure that they dared not subject them to the slightest social contact with the casual stranger, of people who felt neither curiosity nor responsibility for the mass of those who shared their community life and their community problems. Americans

In New York City on a February morning nearly fifty years later, the faintest pale light begins to limn the buildings. A movie, a romantic adventure. It still plays that way in my imagination. And yet, unlike in a movie, I will now pay the consequences of my foolish actions. So many years later, when I have finally begun to offer something of value to the world, something that heals the wounds of time and life, I will have to flee, leave it all behind. I can’t bear it. Worse, though, how can I bear prison? Either way, I will no longer live the life I so love. A tear stings my eye. I don’t want to give this up. This home, these nieces of mine, my Instagram world, this full and satisfying life. Wallowing has never been my style. But . . . where will I go? Who will be there when I arrive? In the dark, I let myself shed tears of regret. My phone rings in my hand, startling me. The screen says Asher. My heart drops. “Asher? Is everything all right?” “Sam is in the hospital. Intensive care.” And suddenly the vistas of faraway lands disappear, and I see myself in prison gray, because I cannot leave my niece. I won’t. “I’ll be right there.” Chapter Eighteen Sam The next time I awaken, my headache is vaguely less horrific. It’s still there, pulsing around the skin of my brain, and I feel dizzy and strange, but I can also actually see a little bit. There are no windows, so I can’t tell what time it is. An IV pumps drugs into my arm, and a machine beeps my heartbeat. I swing my head carefully to the right, and there is Asher, sound asleep. He looks terrible, his skin pale and greasy, his hair unkempt. The vision from my dream pops up, of him balding and older, our two little boys,

That’s the wonderful thing about the theater. Unlike in the movies where once a movie is finished and released you can’t change it, in the theater a show is a living thing. When you realize something is wrong you can actually fix it and mount a new production.

There were lots of kid actors in TV and movies, and it was pretty much a way of life for us back then. Unlike today’s child actors, nobody thought we were anything special.

Colton Mathers appreciating practical jokes is as unlikely as a Disney movie where everybody dies in the end of internal hemorrhaging.

This, you see, is the way of the world. There are people like me, and then there are people who consider me evil because, unlike them, I don't weep at sad movies or funerals or "Auld Lang Syne." But deep inside every bleating sentamentalist lurks the dark embryo of who I am: a cold-blooded opportunist. This is what turns good soldiers into executioners, neighbours into informers, bankers into thieves. Oh, they will probably deny it. They all think they are more human than I am, merely because they weep and I do not.

Now, in my defence, I must stress Daw Suu and I were both (not uncritical, and sometimes mocking) fans of the Star Wars movies;

THE SYSTEM in many ways was a necessary one. Each film was entirely different, but all were expensive. Unlike a factory, a lavish movie set might be used just once, especially if the scene called for a fire or explosion. The key employees, writers, actors, and directors were known to be volatile. Even an expensively produced film that got everything right, however, could not guarantee that audiences would actually pay to watch it. And if a movie was well received by audiences, very little of this knowledge could be directly applied to another film. It was art posing as business. The rise of major studios resulted from an ongoing search for an economic formula that could make the movies work as an industry.

As theaters were the first point of revenue collection for the entire industry, this side of the business often had insights on how to keep the halls full every weekend and therefore needed some control of the product, the films themselves. Unlike a producer, who usually hired people one movie at a time and could scale down expenditures, a theater owner had substantial leases or mortgage payments on his real estate and faced ongoing pressure. Further, theater owners suddenly had to spend large amounts of capital to upgrade their facilities for a new technology.

Unlike the movies, you don’t just leave your home, your marriage and everything you knew and simply start a new life. There is a bit in between where you’re just breathing – like a drowning man who clings to a rock. You know you’re alive, you can move, even speak, but something is missing.

He bent down and studied the red splotch. Fresh. Still liquid. Blood. Unlike in the movies or on television, he did not dip a finger in and test the sample. What idiot in the real world would actually do that? The amount of possible contaminants would be incalculable. Like when the on-screen cop pierces a bag of white powder with a knife, then tastes it. Really?

But the guy in Breathless [Jean-Paul Belmondo] wasn't just a sexy stud prick. He was a little creep, petty thief, piece of shit. And unlike in a Hollywood movie, they didn't sentimentalize him. They always sentimentalized these pieces of shit in Hollywood movies, and it was the phoniest thing Hollywood did. In the real world, these mercenary fuck faces didn't hae a sentimental bone in their body.

Unlike Samiran, now rendered useless to society, with no aim other than watching yet another movie or cricket match on TV.

He thought about doing more reading. It seemed the most comforting activity to do, except for one issue. Unlike a new movie, there was no one to immediately turn and talk to about a book. All books are strays. Books were read at the same time they were unknown at the same time they were revived at the same time they were forgotten. There was no agreed-upon trend of a novel. People found them on their own and all at different stages of life. This was why it was special to have the same favorite authors as a stranger, since both souls were in need of and privately searching for the same thing. A chapter could mean so much. But because Andrei could not share his excitement with anyone without misunderstanding or respectfully feigned interest, he ruled out reading as an activity. And it takes too long to find someone who lived for the same page as you.