Unusual Suspects Quotes

Please, don't hate me because I am beautiful.

Trickster, love will be the end of you.

And who are you supposed to be? the King of snot-nosed delinquents?

I didn't do it,' he insisted. 'Then why did you run?' Sabrina asked. 'And send rabbits to eat us! I'm a seven-year-old girl,' Daphne said. 'Do you know how important bunny rabbits are to me?

Snow, get behind me!" Charming shouted as he leaped to his feet. "I'll handle this brute." "Billy", the teacher cried. "This is the twenty-first century, Women don't need the white knight routine anymore. I can fight my own battles.

..when the first rubber ball smacked her in the head and made her brains rattle in her skull, she knew that something about this dodgeball game was different

Fair Fatality, you are the most unusual female I have encountered in all my thirty-eight years!" "You can't think how deeply flattered I am!" she assured him. "I daresay my head would be quite turned if I didn't suspect that amongst so many a dozen or so may have slipped from your memory.

Of course, the Big Bad Wolf does yoga, Sabrina thought. Why did I even bother to ask?

Trickster,” he said, sniffing the boy. “Love will be the end of you.

I suspect it was probably unusual to suffer from both Generalized Anxiety Disorder and Malingering, unproductiveness tending to make me feel anxious, but there it was. I had both.

In most towns, the police do not rely on an old woman, two kids, and a sleepy dog to solve crimes,

The only clue to what is in people's minds is in their behavior. If a man behaves strangely, oddly, is not himself-- Then you suspect him? No. That is just what I mean. A man whose mind is evil and whose intentions are evil is conscious of that fact and he knows that he must conceal it all costs. He dare not, therefore, afford any unusual behavior.

Wendell turned to the chalkboard and wrote I AM A WORTHLESS FAT-BODY.

It was, however, combined with the fart itself, a highly unusual sight. I remember looking up at him as a huge grin flashed across his face and remained there—a grin of both amusement and, I suspect, of blessed relief.

I didn’t know what he wanted to talk about, but this request was so unusual that I suspected another memo lay in my immediate future. As such, I knew I needed to try to remember every word he spoke, exactly as he said them.

Impatiently I waited for evening, when I might summon you to my presence. An unusual– to me– a perfectly new character, I suspected was yours; I desired to search it deeper, and know it better. You entered the room with a look and air at once shy and independent; you were quaintly dress– much as you are now. I made you talk; ere long I found you full of strange contrasts. Your garb and manner were restricted by rule; your air was often diffident, and altogether that of one refined by nature, but absolutely unused to society, and a good deal afraid of making herself disadvantageously conspicuous by some solecism or blunder; yet, when addressed, you lifted a keen, a daring, and a glowing eye to your interlocutor’s face; there was penetration and power in each glance you gave; when plied by close questions, you found ready and round answers. Very soon you seemed to get used to me – I believe you felt the existence of sympathy between you and your grim and cross master, Jane; for it was astonishing to see how quickly a certain pleasant ease tranquilized your manner; snarl as I would, you showed no surprise, fear, annoyance, or displeasure, at my moroseness; you watched me, and now and then smiled at me with a simple yet sagacious grace I cannot describe. I was at once content and stimulated with what I saw; I liked what I had seen, and wished to see more. Yet, for a long time, I treated you distantly, and sought your company rarely, I was an intellectual epicure, and wished to prolong the gratification of making this novel and piquant acquaintance; besides, I was for a while troubled with a haunting fear that if I handled the flower freely its bloom would fade – the sweet charm of freshness would leave it. I did not then know that it was no transitory blossom, but rather the radiant resemblance of one, cut in an indestructible gem. Moreover, I wished to see whether you would seek me if I shunned you – but you did not; you kept in the school-room as still as your own desk and easel; if by chance I met you, you passed me as soon, and with as little token of recognition, as was consistent with respect. Your habitual expression in those days, Jane, was a thoughtful look; not despondent, fro you were not sickly; but not buoyant, for you had little hope, and no actual pleasure. I wondered what you thought of me– or if you ever thought of me; to find this out, I resumed my notice of you. There was something glad in your glance, and genial in your manner, when you conversed; I saw you had a social heart; it was the silent school-room– it was the tedium of your life that made you mournful. I permitted myself the delight of being kind to you; kindness stirred emotion soon; your face became soft in expression, your tones gentle; I liked my name pronounced by your lips in a grateful, happy accent. I used to enjoy a chance meeting with you, Jane, at this time; there was a curious hesitation in your manner; you glanced at me with a slight trouble– a hovering doubt; you did not know what my caprice might be– whether I was going to play the master, and be stern– or the friend, and be benignant. I was now too fond of you often to stimulate the first whim; and, when I stretched my hand out cordially, such bloom, and light, and bliss, rose to your young, wistful features, I had much ado often to avoid straining you then and there to my heart.

I shared what I feel is the right way to go, the right course of action, and I suspect some of you may see it differently. If you do, I’d like to hear it. I know that my enthusiasm may make it hard to challenge me, but my job is to make the best possible decisions for the organization, not to persuade you of my viewpoint. So please speak up.” This is an unusual and highly appealing way to begin a meeting. At

angular

Successful love may sometimes use the language of flattery, I admit. But hopeless love, dearest, always speaks the truth.

We shouldn't let our envy of distinguished masters of the arts distract us from the wonder of how each of us gets new ideas. Perhaps we hold on to our superstitions about creativity in order to make our own deficiencies seem more excusable. For when we tell ourselves that masterful abilities are simply unexplainable, we're also comforting ourselves by saying that those superheroes come endowed with all the qualities we don't possess. Our failures are therefore no fault of our own, nor are those heroes' virtues to their credit, either. If it isn't learned, it isn't earned. When we actually meet the heroes whom our culture views as great, we don't find any singular propensities––only combinations of ingredients quite common in themselves. Most of these heroes are intensely motivated, but so are many other people. They're usually very proficient in some field--but in itself we simply call this craftmanship or expertise. They often have enough self-confidence to stand up to the scorn of peers--but in itself, we might just call that stubbornness. They surely think of things in some novel ways, but so does everyone from time to time. And as for what we call "intelligence", my view is that each person who can speak coherently already has the better part of what our heroes have. Then what makes genius appear to stand apart, if we each have most of what it takes? I suspect that genius needs one thing more: in order to accumulate outstanding qualities, one needs unusually effective ways to learn. It's not enough to learn a lot; one also has to manage what one learns. Those masters have, beneath the surface of their mastery, some special knacks of "higher-order" expertise, which help them organize and apply the things they learn. It is those hidden tricks of mental management that produce the systems that create those works of genius. Why do certain people learn so many more and better skills? These all-important differences could begin with early accidents. One child works out clever ways to arrange some blocks in rows and stacks; a second child plays at rearranging how it thinks. Everyone can praise the first child's castles and towers, but no one can see what the second child has done, and one may even get the false impression of a lack of industry. But if the second child persists in seeking better ways to learn, this can lead to silent growth in which some better ways to learn may lead to better ways to learn to learn. Then, later, we'll observe an awesome, qualitative change, with no apparent cause--and give to it some empty name like talent, aptitude, or gift.

12.  If we do not wish to fight, we can prevent the enemy from engaging us even though the lines of our encampment be merely traced out on the ground. All we need do is to throw something odd and unaccountable in his way. [This extremely concise expression is intelligibly paraphrased by Chia Lin: “even though we have constructed neither wall nor ditch.” Li Ch’uan says: “we puzzle him by strange and unusual dispositions;” and Tu Mu finally clinches the meaning by three illustrative anecdotes—one of Chu-ko Liang, who when occupying Yang-p’ing and about to be attacked by Ssu-ma I, suddenly struck his colors, stopped the beating of the drums, and flung open the city gates, showing only a few men engaged in sweeping and sprinkling the ground. This unexpected proceeding had the intended effect; for Ssu-ma I, suspecting an ambush, actually drew off his army and retreated. What Sun Tzu is advocating here, therefore, is nothing more nor less than the timely use of “bluff.”]

The night she died, Dan found her propped up in her hospital bed; she appeared to have fallen asleep with the TV on and with the remote-control device held in her hand in such a way that the channels kept changing. But she was dead, not asleep, and her cold thumb had simply attached itself to the button that restlessly roamed the channels—looking for something good.” At the time, in 1989, it seemed a fairly unusual way to die. Nowadays, I suspect, more and more people are dropping off that way. And we’re still looking for something good on television. We won’t find it. There’s precious little on TV that can keep us awake or alive. Ever the prophet, Owen Meany was right about television, too.

Of course, we cannot deny the fact that many people live for a long time even though they idealize the parents who were once cruel to them. But we do not know how they contrived to come to terms with their own un-truth. Most of them passed it on unconsciously to the next generation. What we do know is that, at some point, the writers we have been discussing began to suspect their own truth. But isolated in a society that will always take the part of the parents, they were unable to find the courage to abandon their denial. Just how strong this social pressure can be is something that each and every one of us can experience for ourselves. Adults realizing that they were cruelly treated by their mothers in childhood and talking openly and frankly about that fact will invariably get the same response, from therapists as much as anyone else: “Yes, but she had a difficult time of it, and she did a lot for you. You shouldn’t condemn her; you shouldn’t see things in black and white and take a one-sided view of things. There’s no such thing as ideal parents, etc.” The impression we get is that the people who talk in this way are, in fact, defending their own mothers, though the person they are speaking to is not attacking them. This social pressure is much stronger than we tend to realize. So I hope very much that my discussion of these writers will not be understood as a criticism of their lack of courage. It is meant rather as a sympathetic portrayal of the tragedy of people unable in their isolation to admit their own personal truth, although they sensed it deep down in their own selves. I am writing this book in the hope of being able to reduce that isolation. In therapy, it is by no means unusual to encounter the loneliness of the small child that the adult once was. After all, therapy itself is usually conducted in a way that is also dictated by the Fourth Commandment.

And for answering the 139 questions I asked. Thank you for taking less than ten minutes to reply to my emails, every time, even when it was 5:30 a.m. and you misspelled “consensus,” which is unusual of you and makes me suspect that maybe you were still half asleep.

So the badger poked up the fire, poured himself another cup of tea, and went back to the History to read the curious story of the Fern Vale dwelves, a story (he suspected) that was mostly unknown to the Big Folk. Of course, that sort of thing wasn't at all unusual, for although the human residents of the Land between the Lakes thought they knew everything about their surroundings, and although scholarly books related the history, inventoried the animals and plants, and catalogued the folktales, people were aware of only a fraction of what went on around them. One was not criticizing when one said this; one was simply stating the fact. Humans, by and large, were ignorant of the mysteries of life and land.

If a psychosis was just some synapses misfiring why wouldnt you simply get static? But you dont. You get a carefully crafted and fairly articulate world never seen before. Who's doing this? Who is it who is running around hooking up the dangling wires in new and unusual ways. Why is he doing it? What is the algorithm he follows? Why do we suspect there is one?

Perfect calms at sea are always suspected by the experienced mariner to be the forerunners of a storm, and I know some persons, who, without being generally the devotees of superstition, are apt to apprehend that great and unusual peace or tranquillity will be attended with its opposite. For which reason the antients used, on such occasions, to sacrifice to the goddess Nemesis, a deity who was thought by them to look with an invidious eye on human felicity, and to have a peculiar delight in overturning it.

I just slipped into my mother’s office to look at the names of my new peer helpers, and I’m so happy! Your name is on the list! I thought maybe I’d scared you by coming right out and asking you to apply. I realize it’s an unusual setup, but try not to think of it as my parents offering to pay people to be my friend. I know there’s something unsettling and prideless in that. I prefer to think of it this way: my parents are paying people to pretend to be my friend. This will be much closer to the truth, I suspect, and I have no problem with this. I’m guessing that a lot of people in high school are only pretending to be friends, right? It’ll be a start, I figure.

DETECTIVE FRANK GEYER WAS A big man with a pleasant, earnest face, a large walrus mustache, and a new gravity in his gaze and demeanor. He was one of Philadelphia’s top detectives and had been a member of the force for twenty years, during which time he had investigated some two hundred killings. He knew murder and its unchanging templates. Husbands killed wives, wives killed husbands, and the poor killed one another, always for the usual motives of money, jealousy, passion, and love. Rarely did a murder involve the mysterious elements of dime novels and mystery stories. From the start, however, Geyer’s current assignment—it was now June 1895—had veered from the ordinary. One unusual aspect was that the suspect already was in custody, arrested seven months earlier for insurance fraud and now incarcerated in Philadelphia’s Moyamensing Prison

One feature of our own society that seems decidedly anomalous is the matter of sexual advertisement, As we have seen, it is strongly to be expected on evolutionary grounds that, where the sexes differ, it should be the males that advertise and the females that are drab. Modern western man is undoubtedly exceptional in this respect. It is of course true that some men dress flamboyantly and some women dress drably but, on average, there can be no doubt that in our society the equivalent of the peacock's tail is exhibited by the female, not by the male. Women paint their faces and glue on false eyelashes. Apart from special cases, like actors, men do not. Women seem to be interested in their own personal appearance and are encouraged in this by their magazines and journals. Men's magazines are less preoccupied with male sexual attractiveness, and a man who is unusually interested in his own dress and appearance is apt to arouse suspicion, both among men and among women. When a woman is described in conversation, it is quite likely that her sexual attractiveness, or lack of it, will be prominently mentioned. This is true, whether the speaker is a man or a woman. When a man is described, the adjectives used are much more likely to have nothing to do with sex. Faced with these facts, a biologist would be forced to suspect that he was looking at a society in which females compete for males, rather than vice versa. In the case of birds of paradise, we decided that females are drab because they do not need to compete for males. Males are bright and ostentatious because females are in demand and can afford to be choosy. The reason female birds of paradise are in demand is that eggs are a more scarce resource than sperms. What has happened in modern western man? Has the male really become the sought-after sex, the one that is in demand, the sex that can afford to be choosy? If so, why?

The aspiring child is often checked by the dull disciple who has learned his lessons so imperfectly that he has never got beyond his school-books. Full of fragmentary rules, he has perceived the principle of none of them. The child draws near to him with some outburst of unusual feeling, some scintillation of a lively hope, some wide-reaching imagination that draws into the circle of religious theory the world of nature, and the yet wider world of humanity, for to the child the doings of the Father fill the spaces; he has not yet learned to divide between God and nature, between Providence and grace, between love and benevolence;—the child comes, I say, with his heart full, and the answer he receives from the dull disciple is—" God has said nothing about that in his word, therefore we have no right to believe anything about it. It is better not to speculate on such matters. However desirable it may seem to us, we have nothing to do with it. It is not revealed." For such a man is incapable of suspecting, that what has remained hidden from him may have been revealed to the babe. With the authority, therefore, of years and ignorance, he forbids the child, for he believes in no revelation but the Bible, and in the word of that alone. For him all revelation has ceased with and been buried in the Bible, to be with difficulty exhumed, and, with much questioning of the decayed form, re-united into a rigid skeleton of metaphysical and legal contrivance for letting the love of God have its way unchecked by the other perfections of his being.

Anyone reading or rereading Infinite Jest will notice an interesting pertinence: throughout the book, Wallace’s flat, minor, one-note characters walk as tall as anyone, peacocks of diverse idiosyncrasy. Wallace doesn’t simply set a scene and novelize his characters into facile life; rather, he makes an almost metaphysical commitment to see reality through their eyes. A fine example of this occurs early in Infinite Jest, during its “Where was the woman who said she’d come” interlude. In it we encounter the paranoid weed addict Ken Erdedy, whose terror of being considered a too-eager drug buyer has engendered an unwelcome situation: he is unsure whether or not he actually managed to make an appointment with a woman able to access two hundred grams of “unusually good” marijuana, which he very much wants to spend the weekend smoking. For eleven pages, Erdedy does nothing but sweat and anticipate this woman’s increasingly conjectural arrival with his desired two hundred grams. I suspect no one who has struggled with substance addiction can read this passage without squirming, gasping, or weeping. I know of nothing else in the entirety of literature that so convincingly inhabits a drug-smashed consciousness while remaining a model of empathetic clarity. The literary craftsman’s term for what Wallace is doing within the Erdedy interlude is free indirect style, but while reading Wallace you get the feeling that bloodless matters of craftsmanship rather bored him. Instead, he had to somehow psychically become his characters, which is surely why he wrote so often, and so well, in a microscopically close third person. In this very specific sense, Wallace may be the closest thing to a method actor in American literature, which I cannot imagine was without its subtle traumas. And Erdedy is merely one of Infinite Jest’s hundreds of differently damaged walk-on characters! Sometimes I wonder: What did it cost Wallace to create him?

Moms?’ ‘I am right here with my attention completely focused on you.’ ‘How can you tell if somebody’s sad?’ A quick smile. ‘You mean whether someone’s sad.’ A smile back, but still earnest: ‘That improves it a lot. Whether someone’s sad, how can you tell so you’re sure?’ Her teeth are not discolored; she gets them cleaned at the dentist all the time for the smoking, a habit she despises. Hal inherited the dental problems from Himself; Himself had horrible dental problems; half his teeth were bridges. ‘You’re not exactly insensitive when it comes to people, Love-o,’ she says. ‘What if you, like, only suspect somebody’s sad. How do you reinforce the suspicion?’ ‘Confirm the suspicion?’ ‘In your mind.’ Some of the prints in the deep shag he can see are shoes, and some are different, almost like knuckles. His lordotic posture makes him acute and observant about things like carpet-prints. ‘How would I, for my part, confirm a suspicion of sadness in someone, you mean?’ ‘Yes. Good. All right.’ ‘Well, the person in question may cry, sob, weep, or, in certain cultures, wail, keen, or rend his or her garments.’ Mario nods encouragingly, so the headgear clanks a little. ‘But say in a case where they don’t weep or rend. But you still have a suspicion which they’re sad.’ She uses a hand to rotate the pen in her mouth like a fine cigar. ‘He or she might alternatively sigh, mope, frown, smile halfheartedly, appear downcast, slump, look at the floor more than is appropriate.’ ‘But what if they don’t?’ ‘Well, he or she may act out by seeming distracted, losing enthusiasm for previous interests. The person may present with what appears to be laziness, lethargy, fatigue, sluggishness, a certain passive reluctance to engage you. Torpor.’ ‘What else?’ ‘They may seem unusually subdued, quiet, literally “low.” ’ Mario leans all his weight into his police lock, which makes his head jut, his expression the sort of mangled one that expresses puzzlement, an attempt to reason out something hard. Pemulis called it Mario’s Data-Search Face, which Mario liked. ‘What if sometime they might act even less low than normal. But still these suspicions are in your mind.

Sumerian culture -- the society based on me -- was another manifestation of the metavirus. Except that in this case, it was in a linguistic form rather than DNA." "Excuse me," Mr. Lee says. "You are saying that civilization started out as an infection?" "Civilization in its primitive form, yes. Each me was a sort of virus, kicked out by the metavirus principle. Take the example of the bread-baking me. Once that me got into society, it was a self-sustaining piece of information. It's a simple question of natural selection: people who know how to bake bread will live better and be more apt to reproduce than people who don't know how. Naturally, they will spread the me, acting as hosts for this self-replicating piece of information. That makes it a virus. Sumerian culture -- with its temples full of me -- was just a collection of successful viruses that had accumulated over the millennia. It was a franchise operation, except it had ziggurats instead of golden arches, and clay tablets instead of three-ring binders. "The Sumerian word for 'mind,' or 'wisdom,' is identical to the word for 'ear.' That's all those people were: ears with bodies attached. Passive receivers of information. But Enki was different. Enki was an en who just happened to be especially good at his job. He had the unusual ability to write new me -- he was a hacker. He was, actually, the first modern man, a fully conscious human being, just like us. "At some point, Enki realized that Sumer was stuck in a rut. People were carrying out the same old me all the time, not coming up with new ones, not thinking for themselves. I suspect that he was lonely, being one of the few -- perhaps the only -- conscious human being in the world. He realized that in order for the human race to advance, they had to be delivered from the grip of this viral civilization. "So he created the nam-shub of Enki, a countervirus that spread along the same routes as the me and the metavirus. It went into the deep structures of the brain and reprogrammed them. Henceforth, no one could understand the Sumerian language, or any other deep structure-based language. Cut off from our common deep structures, we began to develop new languages that had nothing in common with each other. The me no longer worked and it was not possible to write new me. Further transmission of the metavirus was blocked." "Why didn't everyone starve from lack of bread, having lost the bread-making me?" Uncle Enzo says. "Some probably did. Everyone else had to use their higher brains and figure it out. So you might say that the nam-shub of Enki was the beginnings of human consciousness -- when we first had to think for ourselves. It was the beginning of rational religion, too, the first time that people began to think about abstract issues like God and Good and Evil. That's where the name Babel comes from. Literally it means 'Gate of God.' It was the gate that allowed God to reach the human race. Babel is a gateway in our minds, a gateway that was opened by the nam-shub of Enki that broke us free from the metavirus and gave us the ability to think -- moved us from a materialistic world to a dualistic world -- a binary world -- with both a physical and a spiritual component.

drippings onto a skillet, which triggered

Once she was out of her clothes and into a warm robe, she headed back downstairs, passing the bathroom door, where she could hear Daphne begging Elvis to get into the tub with her. A tremendous splash told Sabrina that the little girl had gotten her wish.

LEPRECHAUN GOLD; FLOOR PLANS FOR GINGERBREAD HOUSES; TALKING FISH; GHOSTS OF CHRISTMAS PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE; TIK-TOK MEN;

opened the cover and saw a crude drawing of a giant kitten chewing on several screaming farmers

The P.I. states that if something x has happened in certain particular circumstances n times in the past, we are justified in believing that the same circumstances will produce x on the (n + 1)th occasion. The P.I. is wholly respectable and authoritative, and it seems like a well-lit exit out of the whole problem. Until, that is, it happens to strike you (as can occur only in very abstract moods or when there’s an unusual amount of time before the alarm goes off) that the P.I. is itself merely an abstraction from experience … and so now what exactly is it that justifies our confidence in the P.I.? This latest thought may or may not be accompanied by a concrete memory of several weeks spent on a relative’s farm in childhood (long story). There were four chickens in a wire coop off the garage, the brightest of whom was called Mr. Chicken. Every morning, the farm’s hired man’s appearance in the coop area with a certain burlap sack caused Mr. Chicken to get excited and start doing warmup-pecks at the ground, because he knew it was feeding time. It was always around the same time t every morning, and Mr. Chicken had figured out that t(man + sack) = food, and thus was confidently doing his warmup-pecks on that last Sunday morning when the hired man suddenly reached out and grabbed Mr. Chicken and in one smooth motion wrung his neck and put him in the burlap sack and bore him off to the kitchen. Memories like this tend to remain quite vivid, if you have any. But with the thrust, lying here, being that Mr. Chicken appears now actually to have been correct—according to the Principle of Induction—in expecting nothing but breakfast from that (n + 1)th appearance of man + sack at t. Something about the fact that Mr. Chicken not only didn’t suspect a thing but appears to have been wholly justified in not suspecting a thing—this seems concretely creepy and upsetting. Finding some higher-level justification for your confidence in the P.I. seems much more urgent when you realize that, without this justification, our own situation is basically indistinguishable from that of Mr. Chicken. But the conclusion, abstract as it is, seems inescapable: what justifies our confidence in the Principle of Induction is that it has always worked so well in the past, at least up to now. Meaning that our only real justification for the Principle of Induction is the Principle of Induction, which seems shaky and question-begging in the extreme. The only way out of the potentially bedridden-for-life paralysis of this last conclusion is to pursue further abstract side-inquiries into what exactly ‘justification’ means and whether it’s true that the only valid justifications for certain beliefs and principles are rational and noncircular. For instance, we know that in a certain number of cases every year cars suddenly veer across the centerline into oncoming traffic and crash head-on into people who were driving along not expecting to get killed; and thus we also know, on some level, that whatever confidence lets us drive on two-way roads is not 100% rationally justified by the laws of statistical probability. And yet ‘rational justification’ might not apply here. It might be more the fact that, if you cannot believe your car won’t suddenly get crashed into out of nowhere, you just can’t drive, and thus that your need/desire to be able to drive functions as a kind of ‘justification’ of your confidence.* It would be better not to then start analyzing the various putative ‘justifications’ for your need/desire to be able to drive a car—at some point you realize that the process of abstract justification can, at least in principle, go on forever. The ability to halt a line of abstract thinking once you see it has no end is part of what usually distinguishes sane, functional people—people who when the alarm finally goes off can hit the floor without trepidation and plunge into the concrete business of the real workaday world—from the unhinged.

Long COVID should be suspected in people with unusual failing health.

Hilarious!” one kid snorted as the students emptied into the hall. Puck absorbed their praise like a greedy sponge and agreed with each one wholeheartedly that he was indeed a genius. But Sabrina had no interest in Puck’s groupies. Her eyes were fixed on Wendell, who now hurried down the hallway, followed by a cloud of dust. She rushed after him.

Translated literally, Jesus replies, "I am, the (one) speaking to you" [John 4:26]. This word-for-word translation comes out awkwardly in English, so it's often broken up in our Bibles. But as New Testament scholar Craig Evans observes, Jesus's statement is "emphatic and unusual" in the original Greek as well. Smoothing it out in translation masks the fact that this is the first of Jesus's "I am" statements. ...This is the first time in John that Jesus explicitly declares he's the Messiah. And as he does so, Jesus makes an even more extraordinary claim. Each of Jesus's "I am" statements gives us fresh insight into who he is. At first, his words to the Samaritan woman seem like an exception. But if we look more closely, Jesus is giving us more insight about his identity when he says to the Samaritan woman, "I am, the (one) speaking to you." Jesus claims he's the Messiah and the one true covenant God. But he is also the one who is speaking to this sexually suspect, foreign woman. He could have just said "I am he!" But as we look at Jesus through this woman's eyes, we see him as the long-promised King and everlasting God, who chooses to converse with her.

In Project Beta,29 researcher and author Greg Bishop told this weird story of how Valdez and a businessman named Paul Bennewitz were fed disinformation by an officer with the US Air Force’s Office of Special Investigations named Richard Doty. Doty is a notorious (but oddly likeable) villain in ufology; he has since claimed in retirement that he was under orders to lie to Valdez and Bennewitz to distract them from secret unspecified US Air Force projects that Doty was ordered to misidentify as extra-terrestrial. Intriguing then to read in the Ed Mitchell archive documents that what might have fuelled Valdez’s willingness to believe Doty’s disinformation was the statements of multiple local witnesses, who verified that there was indeed highly unusual UAP activity happening around Dulce. All this was detailed in the confidential document written by Colm Kelleher in 1997.30 It suggests perhaps that the now-discredited conspiracy theory with which Bennewitz and Valdez later went public had its origins in what were in fact well-corroborated witness sightings. It was the US Air Force itself that made the implausible extrapolation of this evidence to include dubious allegations of underground alien bases at Dulce. The debunking of the Valdez/Bennewitz conspiracy theory ensured that any claims of strange UAP activity around Dulce were treated with extreme scepticism by all mainstream media. Of course, this was exactly what any agency wanting to hide something in the mountains of New Mexico likely hoped would happen. If the government was testing some new technology in the hills around Dulce, few people would believe it after the discredited Dulce underground UFO base stories. After reading the NIDS’ files, it became clear Bigelow’s investigators suspected the government was up to something in the Dulce hills.

naïve,

Polson had always made butter from stale cream. He never collected milk to get fresh cream. The cream merchants would supply him with cans of cream, which went into his butter production. Sometimes these cans of cream would be kept for as long as ten days without refrigeration. Many pollutants – sometimes even maggots – contaminated the cream and turned it malodorous. Polson’s Manager, Foster, found an answer to all such problems. He acquired a vacreator – a machine that heats cream for pasteurisation with injected steam that quickly raises its temperature. The machine also creates a vacuum, which removes the steam molecules so that it does not dilute the cream. For Polson, the vacreator served a dual purpose: along with the steam, the vacuum also almost totally removed the foul odour from the stale cream. Some odour though did remain and, ironically enough, became a problem for us at Amul. Our butter, like butter from New Zealand, was made of fresh cream – milk to cream to butter, all in the same day. When we introduced this butter into the market, people exclaimed in distaste: ‘What kind of butter is this? There’s no flavour in it. It’s flat!’ Of course, the Parsis in Bombay city’s popular Irani restaurants would not touch it (although I suspect this could as well have been because of their loyalty to ‘apro Pestonjee’, Polson). This was a serious problem and we had to find a solution quickly. We did. At the end of the butter-making process we began to add a permitted chemical additive called diacetyl, which also gave the butter an added ‘flavour’. This solution to a rather unusual problem was legal as long as we printed the line ‘permitted flavours added’ on the packets. In its new form, Amul butter became more acceptable – and sales showed dramatic improvement.

Scott ejected the disc. The Club Red disc was by far the superior, which left Scott wondering what the missing disc showed. He dug out Melon’s interview with Richard Levin to make sure he had it right, and reread the handwritten note: R. Levin—deliv sec vid—2 discs— EV # H6218B Scott decided to phone Cowly. “Joyce? Hey, it’s Scott James. Hope you don’t mind. I have a question about these discs.” “Sure. What’s up?” “I was wondering why you gave me only one of the Club Red discs and not both.” Cowly was silent for a moment. “I gave you two discs.” “Yeah, you did. One from Tyler’s and one from Club Red, but there are supposed to be two from Club Red. Melon has a note here saying two discs were logged.” Cowly was silent some more. “I don’t know what to tell you. There was only the one disc from Club Red. We have the LAX stuff, the disc from Tyler’s, and the disc from Club Red.” “Melon’s note says there were two.” “I hear you. Those things were screened, you know? All we got was a confirmation of arrival and departure times. Nobody saw anything unusual.” “Why is it missing?” She sounded exasperated. “Shit happens. Things get lost, misplaced, people take stuff and forget they have it. I’ll check, okay? These things happen, Scott. Is there anything else?” “No. Thanks.” Scott felt miserable. He hung up, put away the discs, and stretched out on the couch. Maggie came over, sniffed for a spot, and lay down beside the couch. He rested his hand on her back. “You’re the only good part of this.” Thump thump.

Hanging upside down above them was a fat, frog-faced creature. Its head and feet were amphibious, with slimy, bumpy skin and a puffed, bulbous pouch under its lower lip, but it had the arms, legs, and body of a human being. It was the creature’s long sticky green tongue

The girl laughed. “I’m Bella,” she said.

On the chalkboard was another horrible but familiar sight. Someone had dipped his or her hand into a can of paint and pressed it on the wall. The handprint was bright red.

Even Puck, who could usually be counted on to fart during dinner, was oddly quiet.

I have always prided myself on my ability to see things as they really are, without any of the hundreds of emotional filters humans put between themselves and the facts. So I made a conscious effort to clear away the bad air, real and metaphorical, that Hood had left behind. Fact one: Camilla was dead. Two: She had been killed in a very unusual way—and that was actually more important than fact one, because it was an imitation of what had been done to Gunther and Klein. Why would somebody do that? First, it made Deborah look bad. There were people who would want that, but they were either in jail or busy running a murder investigation. But it also made me look bad—and that was more to the point. My Witness had made the threat, and then Camilla turned up dead and I was the main suspect. But

Someone must have noticed a change in a person's lifestyle after October 22, 1989.  Someone must have noticed inappropriate comments, or concerns about Jacob's investigation.  Someone in the family suspects a member of being a child molester - or a neighbor notes someone with an unusual interest in children or who has few adult friends.  But people second-guess themselves, they do not want to get involved, or they talk themselves out of what they know to be true.  Maybe they are afraid.  Many people have called with their suspicions, yet maybe someone still needs to call - could that someone be you?  Please call the proper authorities.  I still beg you to call if you have information about who took Jacob.  It has been so long - please help.  Call 251-4240 or 1-800-325-HOPE.  You can remain anonymous. 

Could I speak to you for a moment, madam?' said Nannie to Agnes. It was at moments of crisis like this that Mary chiefly envied her Aunt Agnes's imperturbable disposition. Most mothers feel a hideous sinking at the heart when these fatal words are pronounced, but Agnes only showed a kindly and inactive interest. In anyone else Mary might have suspected unusual powers of bluff, hiding trembling knees, a feeling of helpless nausea, flashes of light behind the eyes, storm in the brain, and a general desire to say 'Take double your present wages, but don't tell me what it is you want to speak to me about.' But Agnes, placidly confident in the perfection of her own family and the unassailable security of her own existence, was only capable of feeling a mild curiosity and barely capable of showing it.

Nathaniel said, “Allow me to help.” She kept pacing. “What can you do?” “I can marry you.” She whirled, incredulous. “Marry me?” He flinched as though she’d slapped him. “I know it was Lewis you wanted. If that is still the case, I will do everything in my power to convince him. In fact, he may be more amenable, now he knows of your inheritance.” She frowned. “I don’t want to marry Lewis. How would marrying anybody help my sister?” “If Marcus has proposed to your sister to force you from hiding . . . and still hopes to marry you for your inheritance . . .” “My birthday is only two weeks away. If I can remain unwed until I receive my inheritance I will grant Caroline a generous dowry and she can marry someone worthy of her. And I can marry, or not, as I wish.” He shook his head. “You have been living under our roof for months now, Margaret. A gentleman in such a situation, unusual as this one is, has a certain duty, a certain obligation.” A chill ran through her. She lifted her chin. “I assure you there is no obligation, Mr. Upchurch. You and your brother did not know I was here, though I suspect your sister knew all along. You need not worry. You are under no compunction to uphold my honor, such as it is after all this.” “It would be no burden, Miss Macy, I promise you.” He took a step nearer, a grin touching his mouth. “In fact, I can think of no other woman I would rather be shackled to.” She stiffened, anger flaring. “I don’t want you to be shackled to me. I don’t want anyone to have to marry me. Not Marcus Benton, not Lewis, and not you.” “Margaret, I was only joking. Don’t—” She whipped opened the door and whispered harshly, “Now I must ask you to leave, sir, this very moment.” Nathaniel hesitated. Then, with a look of pained regret, he complied.

Every zoo expert knew that certain animals were especially likely to get free of their cages. Some, like monkeys and elephants, could undo cage doors. Others, like wild pigs, were unusually intelligent and could lift gate fasteners with their snouts. But who would suspect that the giant armadillo was a notorious cage-breaker? Or the moose? Yet a moose was almost as skillful with its snout as an elephant with its trunk. Moose were always getting free; they had a talent for it. And so did velociraptors.

These three elements of contained chaos—white space, unusual suspects, and planned serendipity—can help both large businesses and small start-ups to introduce more innovation, drive growth, and propel excellence.

The mood hadn’t been helped by a rare red star blasting across the sky one day—an ill omen, Nesta had heard the priestesses muttering. Cassian reported that even Rhys had been rattled by it, seeming unusually contemplative afterward. But Nesta suspected that the omen wasn’t the only thing contributing to Rhys’s solemnity. Feyre was only two months from giving birth, and they still knew nothing about how to save her.

Puck! You’re . . . you’re . . .” Sabrina stammered. “You’re a hottie!” Daphne shouted.

The Role of Technology in Preventing and Solving Burglaries The world of crime and law enforcement has seen significant technological advancements in recent years. One area where technology has played a vital role is in preventing and solving burglaries. In this blog, we will explore the evolving role of technology in addressing burglary and the various ways it is employed by both law enforcement agencies and homeowners to combat this crime. 1. Home Security Systems One of the most visible and effective uses of technology in burglary prevention is home security systems. These systems often include surveillance cameras, motion sensors, and alarm systems. The ability to monitor and control these systems remotely through smartphone apps has given homeowners a valuable tool in protecting their property. 2. Smart Locks and Access Control Modern technology has given rise to smart locks and access control systems. Homeowners can now control and monitor access to their properties through smartphone apps. This technology allows for greater security and easier management of who enters your home, making it harder for burglars to gain unauthorized access. 3. Artificial Intelligence and Predictive Policing Law enforcement agencies are using artificial intelligence and data analysis to predict and prevent burglaries. By analyzing historical crime data, AI can identify patterns and hotspots, enabling police to allocate resources more effectively. Predictive policing can lead to faster response times and a more proactive approach to preventing burglaries. 4. Video Surveillance and Facial Recognition High-definition video surveillance and facial recognition technology have become powerful tools for both homeowners and law enforcement. Surveillance cameras with facial recognition capabilities can help identify and track potential suspects. This technology can aid in capturing clear images of burglars, making it easier to apprehend them. 5. Social Media and Digital Footprints Social media has become a valuable source of information for law enforcement. Burglars often inadvertently leave digital footprints, such as posts, photos, or location data, that can link them to crime scenes. Detectives can use these digital clues to build cases and identify suspects. 6. DNA Analysis and Forensics Advancements in DNA analysis and forensics have revolutionized the way burglary cases are investigated. DNA evidence can link suspects to crime scenes and help secure convictions. This technology has not only led to the solving of cold cases but also to the prevention of future crimes through the fear of leaving DNA evidence behind. 7. Community Apps and Reporting Many communities now use smartphone apps to report suspicious activities and communicate with neighbors. These apps have become effective in preventing burglaries through community engagement. They facilitate quick reporting of unusual incidents and can be a deterrent to potential burglars. Conclusion Technology has significantly improved the prevention and solving of burglaries. Homeowners now have access to advanced security systems, while law enforcement agencies use data analysis, surveillance, and forensics to track and apprehend suspects. The synergy between technology and law enforcement has made it increasingly challenging for burglars to operate undetected. As technology continues to advance, the fight against burglaries will only become more effective, ultimately making our communities safer.

Muldoon worried even more about the velociraptors. They were instinctive hunters and they never passed up prey. They killed even when they weren't hungry. They killed for the pleasure of killing. They were swift; strong runners and astonishing jumpers. They had lethal claws on all four limbs; a swipe of a forearm would disembowel a man, spilling his guts out. And they had powerful tearing jaws that ripped flesh instead of biting it. They were far more intelligent than the other dinosaurs and they seemed to be natural cage-breakers. Every zoo expert knew that certain animals were especially likely to get free of their cages. Some, like monkeys and elephants, could undo cage doors. Some, like wild pigs, were unusually intelligent and could life gate fasteners with their snouts. But who would suspect that the giant armadillo was a notorious cage-breaker? Or the moose? Yet a moose was almost as skillful with its snout as an elephant with its trunk. Moose were always getting free; they had a talent for it. And so did velociraptors. Raptors were at least as intelligent as chimpanzees and like chimpanzees, they had agile hands that enabled them to open doors and manipulate objects. They could escape with ease. And when, as Muldoon had feared, one of them finally escaped, it killed two construction workers and maimed a third before being recaptured.

He had an urge to tell Othman about Daniel, how he sensed something unusual and powerful about the boy, how he brought him to this place in the hope of making something happen. The only problem was he didn’t know exactly what he was hoping would happen. Although he suspected Othman might be able to advise him on these activities, he shrank from betraying too much.

might mean for their murder investigation. She looked across the table at the Violent Crime Unit’s junior detective. ‘Rae, you get an incident board set up, then find out what you can about Tony Quigley and his wife. All we know so far is that he was a prison officer at Portland until he took early retirement two years ago. Maybe someone bore a grudge against him from back then. But he and his wife seem to have been living a lifestyle beyond what I would have expected. Barry, can you contact the prison governor at Portland and fix up an appointment for us tomorrow? Don’t give too much away but let him know we want to find out all we can about Quigley. Let’s get busy.’ Rae Gregson returned to her desk. She’d become used to this kind of research in the time she’d been with the unit. It had become one of her key specialities — seeking out background information on suspects, victims, family members and contacts. And with such an unusual name as Quigley, it shouldn’t be a difficult task. As the afternoon wore on, the bank of information grew. Tony Quigley had been born in the mid-fifties in Kent to a local Gravesend father

Sally Jackson and son Percy are still missing one week after their mysterious disappearance. The family’s badly burned ’78 Camaro was discovered last Saturday on a north Long Island road with the roof ripped off and the front axle broken. The car had flipped and skidded for several hundred feet before exploding. Mother and son had gone for a weekend vacation to Montauk, but left hastily, under mysterious circumstances. Small traces of blood were found in the car and near the scene of the wreck, but there were no other signs of the missing Jacksons. Residents in the rural area reported seeing nothing unusual around the time of the accident. Ms. Jackson’s husband, Gabe Ugliano, claims that his stepson, Percy Jackson, is a troubled child who has been kicked out of numerous boarding schools and has expressed violent tendencies in the past. Police would not say whether son Percy is a suspect in his mother’s disappearance, but they have not ruled out foul play. Below are recent pictures of Sally Jackson and Percy. Police urge anyone with information to call the following toll-free crime-stoppers hotline.

Granny, we’re not going to make it!” Sabrina shouted, battling the roaring engine to be heard. “I love pancakes, too,” the old woman shouted back. I hate this car, Sabrina thought to herself.

Dear Readers: Please forgive this intrusion, but we (whom you will get to know shortly) feel a need to express to those who have been so kind to come along on Fletcher’s journey thus far: Sorry. It is now evident that what is about to happen to our hero is beyond usual earthly conventions, if one subscribes to the idea that earthly conventions are, in fact, usual. We suspect you do not; advanced and literate earthlings like you (yes, flattery is a tool plied in any dimension) are willing to suspend disbelief when faced with the irrefutable wonder and mystery that exist in such depth, scope, and volume on your planet. Still, you might have preferred the trajectory of Fletcher’s story to follow a less wild arc, perhaps something transformational, but more along the lines of a career change, or an act of heroism, or the meeting of a soul mate. At this point, we’re certain Fletcher would also opt for these more traditional choices. No one, however constrained their present life may be, is prepared when that life is tumbled, jumbled, tossed, spun, jerked, and turned upside down. We do not presume to think that a story can take such a sharp left turn without some sense of being jostled. We hope nothing was spilled. And now, we request your patience and a willingness to go with what is decidedly a very unusual flow. . . . Imagine how Fletcher feels.

Over the next three or four months we simply collected all our procedures manuals…People would ask us from time to time when the new manuals would be ready. Eventually, some began to suspect that an update wasn’t going to appear and asked us why. Only then did we say aloud what we had been thinking: that we were trading written rules for common sense. And that is the system we have today, which is barely a system at all.

Why do you care what happens to a human teacher?” Sabrina said. “I thought you hated humans.” Charming said nothing. “You don’t want anything bad to happen to Ms. White,” Daphne cried. “You are in love with her. You want to kiss and hug her!” “Nonsense!” the mayor shouted. “I can’t have terrorists running around the elementary school, even if I approve of who they’re killing.” “You want to write her love notes,” the little girl persisted. “You want to hold her hand in the park and look at puppies in the pet store.” “Is there an Off button for this one?” Charming asked Granny Relda. The old woman grinned at the mayor. “You haven’t answered the questions.” “All right!” Charming surrendered. “Snow has a knack for getting in trouble. I would sleep better at night knowing she is safe.

To understand what’s plausible and possible beyond the visible horizon—to broaden your definition of x—you must seek out and get to know the “unusual suspects,” the people who aren’t yet winning awards for their work or being featured in “40-Under-40” business lists. More often, they’re stirring up controversy for their radical new ideas. Or they’re silently working away, far away from the public spotlight. They are, however, vitally important, and their ideas are all-too-often ignored or discounted.

what’s beyond the horizon. The fringe sketch is an outline of what and why, not how. Which is to say that now is not the time for process thinking, ruminating over procedures, or questioning whether something can actually be done. At this point in the forecasting process, our job is to expand our field of vision to include all of the unusual suspects and their work. Before starting a fringe sketch, it’s important to observe a few rules: 1. Include theoretical or even poor information. 2. Assume that a present-day obstacle might be overcome in the future. 3. Assume that if something can be hacked (or adapted for a slightly different use), it will.

1. Find the Fringe: Cast a wide enough net to harness information from the fringe. This involves creating a map showing nodes and the relationships between them, and rounding up what you will later refer to as “the unusual suspects.” 2. Use CIPHER: Uncover hidden patterns by categorizing data from the fringe. Patterns indicate a trend, so you’ll do an exhaustive search for Contradictions, Inflections, Practices, Hacks, Extremes, and Rarities. 3. Ask the Right Questions: Determine whether a pattern really is a trend. You will be tempted to stop looking once you’ve spotted a pattern, but you will soon learn that creating counterarguments is an essential part of the forecasting process, even though most forecasters never force themselves to poke holes into every single assumption and assertion they make. 4. Calculate the ETA: Interpret the trend and ensure that the timing is right. This isn’t just about finding a typical S-curve and the point of inflection. As technology trends move along their trajectory, there are two forces in play—internal developments within tech companies, and external developments within the government, adjacent businesses, and the like—and both must be calculated. 5. Create Scenarios and Strategies: Build scenarios to create probable, plausible, and possible futures and accompanying strategies. This step requires thinking about both the timeline of a technology’s development and your emotional reactions to all of the outcomes. You’ll give each scenario a score, and based on your analysis, you will create a corresponding strategy for taking action. 6. Pressure-Test Your Action: But what if the action you choose to take on a trend is the wrong one? In this final step, you must make sure the strategy you take on a trend will deliver the desired outcome, and that requires asking difficult questions about both the present and the future.

The next day, I phoned Senator Sander’s office and reported the activities of this man. By 2011, Sander’s office was fully informed about the CIA in my life and I was told that the office would send a Congressional Liaison officer to complain to CIA about what Sander’s staff termed “stalking.” In 2009, I also filed a FOIA request with the FBI in an attempt to learn if FBI was following me. I doubted that they were but I wanted to make sure. I had never found FBI participation in MKULTRA. The FOIA came back no documents located. After the incidents with the blond man, and my growing anger at the behavior of CIA, who I was certain was behind the harassment, I phoned the FBI office in Albany, New York and explained the situation I had been involved in with CIA. I recall telling the FBI that I realized it all sounded crazy and that the behavior of the CIA was indeed crazy, but that what I was reporting to FBI was accurate. I told the woman on the phone about being followed for months by a man I was able to identify as an undercover federal agent and I gave her his name. I asked the FBI to help me stop the harassment I was being subjected to by CIA and asked them to check with Senator Sander’s office if they still didn’t believe me. I never saw the blond man again and as the weeks went by, I noticed I wasn’t being followed. My new lawyer thought it was unusual for the FBI not to open a case file on a complaint, but I never heard from FBI. By May 2011, I had only one encounter with a stranger in a parking lot. It was similar to the other encounters, without the hostility demonstrated by the blond man. The harassment stopped in late 2010, except my phone remains tapped. I stopped seeing strangers following me, and my mail stopped being stolen. I did however note that by 2010 I stopped sending FOIA requests and no longer requested the help of elected officials. I suspect the reason the harassment stopped was because of the complaints I made to Sanders and the FBI. I don’t doubt that CIA was responsible. Who else would have the sophistication to pull off the types of surveillance that I was subjected to for years after I filed the lawsuit and discovered the Vermont CIA experiments?

He didn't think they were all after a criminal. He suspected it was an innocent girl. Well, a beautiful young woman, really; as comely as his niece Tasha, who was so clever with her loom and quick with her tongue. But this girl had extraordinary silver hair-- a color so unusual the captain had seen it only once before in his long years in the guard. On a royal princess, a tiny baby, dead to the world. In fairy tales and myths, when children were given up because of a prophecy or because the family was starving, they did disappear into the world for a while-- and then came back years later like a cicada, bringing the power of youth and the unavoidable anger of the gods with them.

followed by a pained moan. The children ran to the window, and there was Wendell, lying flat on his back on the ground below. The boy had obviously jumped out the window. When he saw the children looking at him, Wendell climbed to his feet and darted off toward the woods as fast as his chubby legs could carry him.