Unusual Travel Quotes

Every new experience is unusual. The rest of life is just sleep and committee meetings.

You run back and forth listening for unusual events, peering into the faces of travelers. "Why are you looking at me like a madman?" I have lost a friend. Please forgive me.

It was the kind of pure, undiffused light that can only come from a really hot blue sky, the kind that makes even a concrete highway painful to behold and turns every distant reflective surface into a little glint of flame. Do you know how sometimes on very fine days the sun will shine with a particular intensity that makes the most mundane objects in the landscape glow with an unusual radiance, so that buildings and structures you normally pass without a glance suddenly become arresting, even beautiful? Well, they seem to have that light in Australia nearly all the time.

The forest of Skund was indeed enchanted, which was nothing unusual on the Disc, and was also the only forest in the whole universe to be called -- in the local language -- Your Finger You Fool, which was the literal meaning of the word Skund. The reason for this is regrettably all too common. When the first explorers from the warm lands around the Circle Sea travelled into the chilly hinterland they filled in the blank spaces on their maps by grabbing the nearest native, pointing at some distant landmark, speaking very clearly in a loud voice, and writing down whatever the bemused man told them. Thus were immortalised in generations of atlases such geographical oddities as Just A Mountain, I Don't Know, What? and, of course, Your Finger You Fool. Rainclouds clustered around the bald heights of Mt. Oolskunrahod ('Who is this Fool who does Not Know what a Mountain is') and the Luggage settled itself more comfortably under a dripping tree, which tried unsuccessfully to strike up a conversation.

Everything can change in Petersburg except its weather. And its light. It's the northern light, pale and diffused, one in which both memory and eye operate with unusual sharpness. In this light, and thanks to the directness and length of the streets, a walker's thoughts travel farther than his destination...

At the last moment, the fish and I exchange a troubled glance. The murrel seems to be demanding an explanation. Alas, I am in no position to start justifying the unusual treatment. What comes next is a new experience for both the fish and me.

Today, it isn't unusual for meat to travel almost halfway around the globe to reach your supermarket. The average distance our meat travels hovers arounf fifteen hundred miles.

They ticked the boxes of a certain kind of enlightened, educated middle-classness, the love of dresses that were more interesting than pretty, the love of the eclectic, the love of what they were supposed to love. Ifemelu imagined them when they traveled: they would collect unusual things and fill their homes with them, unpolished evidence of their polish.

Good life is not a sprint. It’s an exerting marathon of purpose, passion, patience and perseverance. It’s the road where faith and hard work meet. It is an unusual love adventure between success and failure. It is where truth is a belt and integrity a shield. It is knowing your lane, staying on your lane and running your own race. It’s a road loathed and less traveled by most men.

The search for the exotic, the strange, the unusual, the uncommon has often taken the form of pilgrimages, of turning away from the world, the 'Journey to the East,' to another country or to a different religion. The great lesson from the true mystics, from the Zen monks, and now also from the Humanistic and Transpersonal psychologists -- that the sacred is in the ordinary, that it is to be found in one's daily life, in one's neighbors, friends, and family, in one's back yard, and that travel may be a flight from confronting the sacred -- this lesson can be easily lost. To be looking elsewhere for miracles is to me a sure sign of ignorance that everything is miraculous.

Join the Rienish navy. See unusual sights. Never sleep with the lights out again.

The Special Operations Network was instigated to handle policing duties considered either too unusual or too specialized to be tackled by the regular force. There were thirty departments in all, starting at the more mundane Neighborly Disputes (SO-30) and going onto Literary Detectives (SO-27) and Art Crime (SO-24). Anything below SO-20 was restricted information, although it was common knowledge that the ChronoGuard was SO-12 and Antiterrorism SO-9. It is rumored that SO-1 was the department that polices the SpecOps themselves. Quite what the others do is anyone's guess. What is known is that the individual operatives themselves are mostly ex-military or ex-police and slightly unbalanced. 'If you want to be a SpecOp,' the saying goes, 'act kinda weird...

Because of his unusual way of handling language, Cummings had to travel a long road from the time his early books were ridiculed for their eccentricity to the point at which, with Robert Frost, he was one of the two most popular poets in America.

I would ask myself what o'clock it could be; I could hear the whistling of trains, which, now nearer and now farther off, punctuating the distance like the note of a bird in a forest, shewed me in perspective the deserted countryside through which a traveller would be hurrying towards the nearest station: the path that he followed being fixed for ever in his memory by the general excitement due to being in a strange place, to doing unusual things, to the last words of conversation, to farewells exchanged beneath an unfamiliar lamp which echoed still in his ears amid the silence of the night; and to the delightful prospect of being once again at home.

They have cast my life like dice, in a game that is not a game. The unusual erupted into my life like a storm; I mean unusual in my actual perception of things. Do not mistake me; I never desired things that are certainly harder to bear, and nobody asked me if I really wanted an extraordinary life. That is not entirely true; I was asked, in the way a child seeing a cake is asked if he really wants to eat it.

No one gets fridge magnets for the travel this summer, because this season we have gone too far. And for all the trips you make inwards, there are no souvenirs and no postcards.

It is hardly unusual for a young man to be drawn to a pursuit considered reckless by his elders; engaging in risky behavior is a rite of passage in our culture no less than in most others. Danger has always held a certain allure. That, in large part, is why so many teenagers drive too fast and drink too much and take too many drugs, why it has always been so easy for nations to recruit young men to go to war. It can be argued that youthful derring-do is in fact evolutionarily adaptive, a behavior encoded in our genes. McCandless, in his fashion, merely took risk-taking to its logical extreme.

Jean Chappe spent months travelling to Siberia by coach, boat and sleigh, nursing his delicate instruments over every perilous bump, only to find the last vital stretch blocked by swollen rivers, the result of unusually heavy spring rains, which the locals were swift to blame on him after they saw him pointing strange instruments at the sky. Chappe managed to escape with his life, but with no useful measurements.

Chris loved to look at every type of plant, animal, and bug he hadn’t seen before on the trail and point out those he did recognize. He enjoyed walking along small streams, listening to the water as it traveled, and searching for eddies where we could watch the minnows scurry amongst the rocks. On one Shenandoah trip, while we were resting at a waterfall, eating our chocolate-covered granola bars and watching the water pummel the rocks below, he said, “See, Carine ? That’s the purity of nature. It may be harsh in its honesty, but it never lies to you”. Chris seemed to be most comfortable outdoors, and the farther away from the typical surroundings and pace of our everyday lives the better. While it was unusual for a solid week to pass without my parents having an argument that sent them into a negative tailspin of destruction and despair, they never got into a fight of any consequence when we were on an extended family hike or camping trip. It seemed like everything became centered and peaceful when there was no choice but to make nature the focus. Our parents’ attention went to watching for blaze marks on trees ; staying on the correct trail ; doling out bug spray, granola bars, sandwiches, and candy bars at proper intervals ; and finding the best place to pitch the tent before nightfall. They taught us how to properly lace up our hiking boots and wear the righ socks to keep our feet healthy and reliable. They showed us which leaves were safe to use as toilet paper and which would surely make us miserable downtrail. We learned how to purify water for our canteens if we hadn’t found a safe spring and to be smart about conserving what clean water we had left. At night we would collect rocks to make a fire ring, dry wood to burn, and long twigs for roasting marshmallows for the s’more fixings Mom always carried in her pack. Dad would sing silly, non-sensical songs that made us laugh and tell us about the stars.

His was one of those well-groomed reputations that get the most out of everything; any unusual holiday acquires the character of an exploration, and though the explorer takes care to do nothing really original, the public does not know this

Her attraction to that solid type depended to some extent on a belief in herself as its opposite-a girl still cut out for unusual adventures and unusual personalities...Yes, it was time to put an end to her girlhood, but she couldn't yet put an end to this sense of herself...

In an age of guidebooks, websites, and radio waves, discovery has nearly become a lost feeling. If anything, it is now a matter of expectations to surpass—rarely a matter of unexpected wonderment. It is unusual to find a situation that appears without word, or a place that was not known to be on the road.

On the same convoy were two marine “snuffies,” or combat correspondents, Steve Berntson and Dale Dye. Both were marine sergeants with unusual jobs. They were “military journalists,” or, rather, public relations reporters in the field charged with writing stories about their fellow marines. They were assigned to the Information Services Office (ISO) and covered the war the same way as civilian journalists but with a mandate to stress the positive. They had a license to go anywhere and do anything that could be turned into a story, so they were far more widely traveled than most marines, and they had a great deal more independence.

It was history’s first co-operative international scientific venture, and almost everywhere it ran into problems. Many observers were waylaid by war, sickness or shipwreck. Others made their destinations but opened their crates to find equipment broken or warped by tropical heat. Once again the French seemed fated to provide the most memorably unlucky participants. Jean Chappe spent months travelling to Siberia by coach, boat and sleigh, nursing his delicate instruments over every perilous bump, only to find the last vital stretch blocked by swollen rivers, the result of unusually heavy spring rains, which the locals were swift to blame on him after they saw him pointing strange instruments at the sky. Chappe managed to escape with his life, but with no useful measurements. Unluckier

They were properly mad in the Shakespearean sense, talking sense when you least expected it. In North London, where councillors once voted to change the name of the area to Nirvana, it is not unusual to walk the streets and be suddenly confronted by sage words from the chalkfaced, blue-lipped, or eyebrowless. From across the street or from the other end of a tube carriage they will use their schizophrenic talent for seeing connections in the random (for discerning the whole world in a grain of sand, for deriving narrative from nothing) to riddle you, to rhyme you, to strip you down, to tell you who you are and where you’re going (usually Baker Street—the great majority of modernday seers travel the Metropolitan Line) and why. But as a city we are not appreciative of these people. Our gut instinct is that they intend to embarrass us, that they’re out to shame us somehow as they lurch down the train aisle, bulbous-eyed and with carbuncled nose, preparing to ask us, inevitably, what we are looking at. What the fuck we are looking at. As a kind of preemptive defense mechanism, Londoners have learned not to look, never to look, to avoid eyes at all times so that the dreaded question “What you looking at?” and its pitiful, gutless, useless answer —“Nothing”—might be avoided.

Chapter One The weather in Paris was unusually warm as Peter Haskell’s plane landed at Charles de Gaulle Airport. The plane taxied neatly to the gate, and a few minutes later, briefcase in hand, Peter was striding through the airport. He was almost smiling as he got on the customs line, despite the heat of the day and the number of people crowding ahead of him in line. Peter Haskell loved Paris. He generally traveled to Europe

On our way down, we passed a two-story villa, hidden in a thicket of Chinese parasol trees, magnolia, and pines. It looked almost like a random pile of stones against the background of the rocks. It struck me as an unusually lovely place, and I snapped my last shot. Suddenly a man materialized out of nowhere and asked me in a low but commanding voice to hand over my camera. He wore civilian clothes, but I noticed he had a pistol. He opened the camera and exposed my entire roll of film. Then he disappeared, as if into the earth. Some tourists standing next to me whispered that this was one of Mao's summer villas. I felt another pang of revulsion toward Mao, not so much for his privilege, but for the hypocrisy of allowing himself luxury while telling his people that even comfort was bad for them. After we were safely out of earshot of the invisible guard, and I was bemoaning the loss of my thirty-six pictures, Jin-ming gave me a grin: "See where goggling at holy places gets you!" We left Lushan by bus. Like every bus in China, it was packed, and we had to crane our necks desperately trying to breathe. Virtually no new buses had been built since the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, during which time the urban population had increased by several tens of millions. After a few minutes, we suddenly stopped. The front door was forced open, and an authoritative-looking man in plainclothes squeezed in. "Get down! Get down!" he barked. "Some American guests are coming this way. It is harmful to the prestige of our motherland for them to see all these messy heads!" We tried to crouch down, but the bus was too crowded. The man shouted, "It is the duty of everyone to safeguard the honor of our motherland! We must present an orderly and dignified appearance! Get down! Bend your knees!" Suddenly I heard Jin-ming's booming voice: "Doesn'T Chairman Mao instruct us never to bend our knees to American imperialists?" This was asking for trouble. Humor was not appreciated. The man shot a stern glance in our direction, but said nothing. He gave the bus another quick scan, and hurried off. He did not want the "American guests' to witness a scene. Any sign of discord had to be hidden from foreigners. Wherever we went as we traveled down the Yangtze we saw the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution: temples smashed, statues toppled, and old towns wrecked. Litfie evidence remained of China's ancient civilization. But the loss went even deeper than this. Not only had China destroyed most of its beautiful things, it had lost its appreciation of them, and was unable to make new ones. Except for the much-scarred but still stunning landscape, China had become an ugly country.

On the way back, Dennis, who has been unusually quiet this lunchtime, speaks up. ‘I’ve been thinking about that Robert Frost poem,’ he says. ‘I don’t think it’s about making choices at all.’ ‘What’s it about, so?’ Geoff says. ‘Anal sex,’ Dennis says. ‘Anal sex?’ ‘How’d’you figure, Dennis?’ ‘Well, once you see it, it’s pretty obvious. Just look at what he says. He’s in a wood, right? He sees two roads in front of him. He takes the one less travelled. What else could it be about?

We have heard that a few days after this, when the Provincetown Bank was robbed, speedy emissaries from Provincetown made particular inquiries concerning us at this lighthouse. Indeed, they traced us all the way down the Cape, and concluded that we came by this unusual route down the back side and on foot in order that we might discover a way to get off with our booty when we had committed the robbery. The Cape is so long and narrow, and so bare withal, that it is well-nigh impossible for a stranger to visit it without the knowledge of its inhabitants generally, unless he is wrecked on to it in the night. So, when this robbery occurred, all their suspicions seem to have at once centered on us two travelers who had just passed down it. If we had not chanced to leave the Cape so soon, we should probably have been arrested. The real robbers were two young men from Worcester County who traveled with a centre-bit, and are said to have done their work very neatly. But the only bank that we pried into was the great Cape Cod sand-bank, and we robbed it only of an old French crown piece, some shells and pebbles, and the materials of this story.

A second later, Ron had snatched his arm back from around her shoulders; she had dropped The Monster Book of Monsters on his foot. The book had broken free from its restraining belt and snapped viciously at Ron’s ankle. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry!” Hermione cried as Harry wrenched the book from Ron’s leg and retied it shut. “What are you doing with all those books anyway?” Ron asked, limping back to his bed. “Just trying to decide which ones to take with us,” said Hermione. “When we’re looking for the Horcruxes.” “Oh, of course,” said Ron, clapping a hand to his forehead. “I forgot we’ll be hunting down Voldemort in a mobile library.” “Ha ha,” said Hermione, looking down at Spellman’s Syllabary. “I wonder…will we need to translate runes? It’s possible…I think we’d better take it, to be safe.” She dropped the syllabary onto the larger of the two piles and picked up Hogwarts, A History. “Listen,” said Harry. He had sat up straight. Ron and Hermione looked at him with similar mixtures of resignation and defiance. “I know you said after Dumbledore’s funeral that you wanted to come with me,” Harry began. “Here he goes,” Ron said to Hermione, rolling his eyes. “As we knew he would,” she sighed, turning back to the books. “You know, I think I will take Hogwarts, A History. Even if we’re not going back there, I don’t think I’d feel right if I didn’t have it with--” “Listen!” said Harry again. “No, Harry, you listen,” said Hermione. “We’re coming with you. That was decided months ago--years, really.” “But--” “Shut up,” Ron advised him. “--are you sure you’ve thought this through?” Harry persisted. “Let’s see,” said Hermione, slamming Travels with Trolls onto the discarded pile with a rather fierce look. “I’ve been packing for days, so we’re ready to leave at a moment’s notice, which for your information has included doing some pretty difficult magic, not to mention smuggling Mad-Eye’s whole stock of Polyjuice Potion right under Ron’s mum’s nose.” “I’ve also modified my parents’ memories so that they’re convinced they’re really called Wendell and Monica Wilkins, and that their life’s ambition is to move to Australia, which they have now done. That’s to make it more difficult for Voldemort to track them down and interrogate them about me--or you, because unfortunately, I’ve told them quite a bit about you. “Assuming I survive our hunt for the Horcruxes, I’ll find Mum and Dad and lifted the enchantment. If I don’t--well, I think I’ve cast a good enough charm to keep them safe and happy. Wendell and Monica Wilkins don’t know that they’ve got a daughter, you see.” Hermione’s eyes were swimming with tears again. Ron got back off the bed, put his arm around her once more, and frowned at Harry as though reproaching him for lack of tact. Harry could not think of anything to say, not least because it was highly unusual for Ron to be teaching anyone else tact.

Part of what kept him standing in the restive group of men awaiting authorization to enter the airport was a kind of paralysis that resulted from Sylvanshine’s reflecting on the logistics of getting to the Peoria 047 REC—the issue of whether the REC sent a van for transfers or whether Sylvanshine would have to take a cab from the little airport had not been conclusively resolved—and then how to arrive and check in and where to store his three bags while he checked in and filled out his arrival and Post-code payroll and withholding forms and orientational materials then somehow get directions and proceed to the apartment that Systems had rented for him at government rates and get there in time to find someplace to eat that was either in walking distance or would require getting another cab—except the telephone in the alleged apartment wasn’t connected yet and he considered the prospects of being able to hail a cab from outside an apartment complex were at best iffy, and if he told the original cab he’d taken to the apartment to wait for him, there would be difficulties because how exactly would he reassure the cabbie that he really was coming right back out after dropping his bags and doing a quick spot check of the apartment’s condition and suitability instead of it being a ruse designed to defraud the driver of his fare, Sylvanshine ducking out the back of the Angler’s Cove apartment complex or even conceivably barricading himself in the apartment and not responding to the driver’s knock, or his ring if the apartment had a doorbell, which his and Reynolds’s current apartment in Martinsburg most assuredly did not, or the driver’s queries/threats through the apartment door, a scam that resided in Claude Sylvanshine’s awareness only because a number of independent Philadelphia commercial carriage operators had proposed heavy Schedule C losses under the proviso ‘Losses Through Theft of Service’ and detailed this type of scam as prevalent on the poorly typed or sometimes even handwritten attachments required to explain unusual or specific C-deductions like this, whereas were Sylvanshine to pay the fare and the tip and perhaps even a certain amount in advance on account so as to help assure the driver of his honorable intentions re the second leg of the sojourn there was no tangible guarantee that the average taxi driver—a cynical and ethically marginal species, hustlers, as even their smudged returns’ very low tip-income-vs.-number-of-fares-in-an-average-shift ratios in Philly had indicated—wouldn’t simply speed away with Sylvanshine’s money, creating enormous hassles in terms of filling out the internal forms for getting a percentage of his travel per diem reimbursed and also leaving Sylvanshine alone, famished (he was unable to eat before travel), phoneless, devoid of Reynolds’s counsel and logistical savvy in the sterile new unfurnished apartment, his stomach roiling in on itself in such a way that it would be all Sylvanshine could do to unpack in any kind of half-organized fashion and get to sleep on the nylon travel pallet on the unfinished floor in the possible presence of exotic Midwest bugs, to say nothing of putting in the hour of CPA exam review he’d promised himself this morning when he’d overslept slightly and then encountered last-minute packing problems that had canceled out the firmly scheduled hour of morning CPA review before one of the unmarked Systems vans arrived to take him and his bags out through Harpers Ferry and Ball’s Bluff to the airport, to say even less about any kind of systematic organization and mastery of the voluminous Post, Duty, Personnel, and Systems Protocols materials he should be receiving promptly after check-in and forms processing at the Post, which any reasonable Personnel Director would expect a new examiner to have thoroughly internalized before reporting for the first actual day interacting with REC examiners, and which there was no way in any real world that Sylvanshine could expect

When you come to any town And one comes to any town very late When you come very late to any town In case that town happens to be Valjevo Where I also came You'll come by the path you had to come by Which didn't exist before you But was born with you For you to go by your path And meet her whom you must meet On the path you must go by Who was your life Even before you met her Or knew that she existed Both her and the town to which you came. ***** Until she comes into your life And there forever remains She who started towards you From a great distance From somewhere in the Russian Jerusalem From the Caucasus from Pyatigorsk Where she had never been And her name was what it was For instance Vera Pavlodoljska And looked the way she looked The way no one on earth looks anymore. ***** That will be the only town Where you’ve always been And as soon as you heard her name And before you met her You always knew her And already loved her for centuries. When you come to any town And one comes to any town very late When you come very late to any town In case that town happens to be Valjevo You will come stepping to a double echo Yours and the clatter of another Who travels with you And whose voice blows in the wind On an unusual day for that time of year So even you won’t be sure What town that is Nor which are your steps You’ll only know that voice That doesn’t blow in the wind But appears in you ***** When you come very late to any town The world will become a reminder of her And there won’t be a single place on earth Where she won’t be waiting for you Nor a mirror in which she won’t appear Nor blonde hair that isn’t hers Nor a cloud without her silken smile Space, fields and water have remembered her The way she was when you first met her In any town ***** And nothing would be the way that it is If it could have been the way that it couldn’t Because there exists only one town And only one arrival And only one encounter And each is the first and only And it never happened before or after And all towns are one Parts of one single town Of a town above all towns Of a town that is you Towards which everyone goes ***** And as soon as you saw her You loved her from the beginning And in advance rued the parting Which took place Before you met her Because there exists only one town And only one woman And one single day And one song above all songs And one single word And one town in which you heard it And one mouth that said it And from everything about the way it uttered it You knew it was uttering it for the first time And that you could quietly shut your eyes Because you’d already died and already risen And that which never was had repeated itself.

Psychoanalysis: An Elegy" What are you thinking about? I am thinking of an early summer. I am thinking of wet hills in the rain Pouring water. Shedding it Down empty acres of oak and manzanita Down to the old green brush tangled in the sun, Greasewood, sage, and spring mustard. Or the hot wind coming down from Santa Ana Driving the hills crazy, A fast wind with a bit of dust in it Bruising everything and making the seed sweet. Or down in the city where the peach trees Are awkward as young horses, And there are kites caught on the wires Up above the street lamps, And the storm drains are all choked with dead branches. What are you thinking? I think that I would like to write a poem that is slow as a summer As slow getting started As 4th of July somewhere around the middle of the second stanza After a lot of unusual rain California seems long in the summer. I would like to write a poem as long as California And as slow as a summer. Do you get me, Doctor? It would have to be as slow As the very tip of summer. As slow as the summer seems On a hot day drinking beer outside Riverside Or standing in the middle of a white-hot road Between Bakersfield and Hell Waiting for Santa Claus. What are you thinking now? I’m thinking that she is very much like California. When she is still her dress is like a roadmap. Highways Traveling up and down her skin Long empty highways With the moon chasing jackrabbits across them On hot summer nights. I am thinking that her body could be California And I a rich Eastern tourist Lost somewhere between Hell and Texas Looking at a map of a long, wet, dancing California That I have never seen. Send me some penny picture-postcards, lady, Send them. One of each breast photographed looking Like curious national monuments, One of your body sweeping like a three-lane highway Twenty-seven miles from a night’s lodging In the world’s oldest hotel. What are you thinking? I am thinking of how many times this poem Will be repeated. How many summers Will torture California Until the damned maps burn Until the mad cartographer Falls to the ground and possesses The sweet thick earth from which he has been hiding. What are you thinking now? I am thinking that a poem could go on forever.

appeal or a merely formal text: it was an act which, with good luck, could have changed the course of events for the good of Europe. This is still my opinion today.’ Monnet had an excellent relationship with both Churchill and Reynaud, and his idea, unusual though it may have been, was given serious consideration. ‘My first reaction was unfavourable,’ Churchill wrote in his war diaries. But when he introduced the proposal to the cabinet, he saw to his amazement how ‘staid, solid, experienced politicians of all parties engaged themselves so passionately in an immense design whose implications and consequences were not in any way thought out.’ Finally, Churchill agreed that the plan should be explored, as did de Gaulle – who had come to England on his own authority – and

The maxim, by which we commonly conduct ourselves in our reasonings, is, that the objects, of which we have no experience, resemble those, of which we have; that what we have found to be most usual is always most probable; and that where there is an opposition of arguments, we ought to give the preference to such as are founded on the greatest number of past observations. But though, in proceeding by this rule, we readily reject any fact which is unusual and incredible in an ordinary degree; yet in advancing farther, the mind observes not always the same rule; but when anything is affirmed utterly absurd and miraculous, it rather the more readily admits of such a fact, upon account of that very circumstance, which ought to destroy all its authority. The passion of surprise and wonder, arising from miracles, being an agreeable emotion, gives a sensible tendency towards the belief of those events, from which it is derived. And this goes so far, that even those who cannot enjoy this pleasure immediately, nor can believe those miraculous events, of which they are informed, yet love to partake of the satisfaction at secondhand or by rebound, and place a pride and delight in exciting the admiration of others. 17 With what greediness are the miraculous accounts of travelers received, their descriptions of sea and land monsters, their relations of wonderful adventures, strange men, and uncouth manners? But if the spirit of religion join itself to the love of wonder, there is an end of common sense; and human testimony, in these circumstances, loses all pretensions to authority. A religionist may be an enthusiast, and imagine he sees what has no reality: He may know his narrative to be false, and yet persevere in it, with the best intentions in the world, for the sake of promoting so holy a cause: Or even where this delusion has not place, vanity, excited by so strong a temptation, operates on him more powerfully than on the rest of mankind in any other circumstances; and self-interest with equal force. His auditors may not have, and commonly have not, sufficient judgment to canvass his evidence: What judgment they have, they renounce by principle, in these sublime and mysterious subjects: Or if they were ever so willing to employ it, passion and a heated imagination disturb the regularity of its operations. Their credulity increases his impudence: And his impudence overpowers their credulity.

This preternatural love of rules almost for their own sake punctuates German finance as it does German life. As it happens, a story had just broken that a German reinsurance company called Munich Re, back in June 2007, or just before the crash, had sponsored a party for its best producers that offered not just chicken dinners and nearest-to-the-pin golf competitions but a blowout with prostitutes in a public bath. In finance, high or low, this sort of thing is of course not unusual. What was striking was how organized the German event was. The company tied white and yellow and red ribbons to the prostitutes to indicate which ones were available to which men. After each sexual encounter the prostitute received a stamp on her arm to indicate how often she had been used. The Germans didn’t just want hookers: they wanted hookers with rules.

Although quick to become bored by everything, I am always patient with the smallest details: I am endowed with the fortitude to face every impediment and, even when I grow weary of my object, my persistence is always greater than my boredom. I have never abandoned any project worth the trouble of completing. There are many things in my life that I have pursued for fifteen or twenty years with as much ardor on the last day as the first. My supple intelligence has extended itself to secondary matters also. I was deft at chess, skilled at billiards, hunting, and fencing, and I was a passable draughtsman. I would have sung well, too, if my voice had been trained. All this, combined with my unusual education and my experience as a soldier and a traveler, explains why I have never been a pedant, nor ever displayed the dull conceit, awkwardness, and slovenliness of the literary men of the last century, nor the arrogant self-assurance, the vain and envious braggadocio, of the new authors.

At last they came to the lower slopes of the great mountains. Here she met a wild and bedraggled boy. He stumbled across her when she had stopped to rest and suckle the baby. The boy stared at the unlikely pair for a moment, then seated himself on the ground at a respectful distance, obviously preparing to converse. He was the strangest looking boy she had ever seen. Evidently a changeling like herself, for he was tall and straight with long slender limbs, but his hair was golden like the sun and his eyes a deep blue like the sky. He looked to be about fifteen years old, not quite a man, yet man enough to survive. She guessed he must have originated from the fabled district of Shor, in the far south, where it was rumoured that all the people were changelings, and all golden-haired. Astelle tensed, fully expecting Torking to deliver one of his pain bolts to the curious boy, but the child seemed unperturbed, and simply carried on suckling. This boy's attention was obviously not deemed as a threat. She relaxed and smiled at the youth. He returned the smile, white teeth startling against his tanned and dirty face. ‘Why are you travelling all alone?’ he asked. Encouraged by Torking's mindwhispers, Astelle managed to concoct a story very close to the truth. ‘As you can see, my child is rather unusual,’ she explained. ‘I could not bear to raise him among mortals who would constantly deride and insult him – and his father has left me, so I had no choice but to run from my tribe.’ Sympathy appeared in the deep blue eyes. ‘I understand that very well,’ he said. ‘I am an escaped slave. I was captured in infancy, and have no memory of my own people, but all my life I have been mocked and abused because I am different. My name is Bren. I would like to travel with you, if you don't mind. I could take care of you both.’ ‘Keep him,’ Torking mindwhispered. ‘He will be useful to fish and hunt for us. But do not tell him that I speak to you.’ Astelle smiled. ‘Thank you Bren,’ she said. ‘I will be glad of your company. I am called Astelle.’ ‘A Faen name...’ he said wonderingly. They began to climb the mountains of Clor.

I know many souls that toss and whirl and pass, but none there are that intrigue me more than the Souls of White Folk. Of them I am singularly clairvoyant. I see in and through them. I view them from unusual points of vantage. Not as a foreigner do I come, for I am native, not foreign, bone of their thought and flesh of their language. Mine is not the knowledge of the traveler or the colonial composite of dear memories, words and wonder. Nor yet is my knowledge that which servants have of masters, or mass of class, or capitalist of artisan. Rather I see these souls undressed and from the back and side. I see the working of their entrails. I know their thoughts and they know that I know. This knowledge makes them now embarrassed, now furious. They deny my right to live and be and call me misbirth! My word is to them mere bitterness and my soul, pessimism. And yet as they preach and strut and shout and threaten, crouching as they clutch at rags of facts and fancies to hide their nakedness, they go twisting, flying by my tired eyes and I see them ever stripped,—ugly, human.

I've defined myself, privately and abstractly, by my brief, intense years as an athlete, a swimmer. I practiced five or six hours a day, six days a week, eating and sleeping as much as possible in between. Weekends were spent either training or competing. I wasn't the best; I was relatively fast. I trained, ate, traveled, and showered with the best in the country, but wasn't the best; I was pretty good. I liked how hard swimming at that level was- that I could do something difficult and unusual. Liked knowing my discipline would be recognized, respected, that I might not be able to say the right things or fit in, but I could do something well. I wanted to believe that I was talented; being fast was proof. Though I loved racing, the idea of fastest, of number one, of the Olympics, didn't motivate me. I still dream of practice, of races, coaches and blurry competitors. I'm drawn to swimming pools, all swimming pools, no matter how small or murky. When I swim now, I step into the water as though absentmindedly touching a scar. My recreational laps are phantoms of my competitive races

We traveled through Texas for a couple of weeks, then went to the West Coast. In San Diego, near where we’d lived, a friend came up to me and said she was so glad to see us together. “We really haven’t had much quality time,” I confessed. “Chris is always so busy with the media and everything.” “Yes, but I can tell he needs you.” “Really?” “Whenever you walk away, there’s a look on his face. He’s looking around, wondering where you are.” Just being present for him turned out to be more important than I realized. Part of it was the toll the attention and the interviews were taking on Chris-he was reliving Iraq yet again, over and over, several times a day. But I came to realize the need was deeper than that. Having come through so much together, we had each reached the point where our love reinforced and nurtured us. Having me physically close gave him a safe base no matter how unusual or crazy the rest of the world got. With the tumult of demands for interviews and face time and all the rest, he knew he could just reach out and touch me to relax, if only for a moment. He was my strength at home. Now, on the road, in a slightly different way, I was his.

When a Southerner took the trouble to pack a trunk and travel twenty miles for a visit, the visit was seldom of shorter duration than a month, usually much longer. Southerners were as enthusiastic visitors as they were hosts, and there was nothing unusual in relatives coming to spend the Christmas holidays and remaining until July. Often when newly married couples went on the usual round of honeymoon visits, they lingered in some pleasant home until the birth of their second child. Frequently elderly aunts and uncles came to Sunday dinner and remained until they were buried years later. Visitors presented no problem, for houses were large, servants numerous and the feeding of several extra mouths a minor matter in that land of plenty. All ages and sexes went visiting, honeymooners, young mothers showing of new babies, convalescents, the bereaved, girls whose parents were anxious to remove them from the dangers of unwise matches, girls who had reached the danger age without becoming engaged and who, it was hoped, would make suitable matches under the guidance of relatives in other places. Visitors added excitement and variety to the slow-moving Southern life and they were always welcome.

WHY THE ADMIRALTY would seek to assign fault to Turner defies ready explanation, given that isolating Germany as the sole offender would do far more to engender global sympathy for Britain and cement animosity toward Germany. By blaming Turner, however, the Admiralty hoped to divert attention from its own failure to safeguard the Lusitania. (Questioned on the matter in the House of Commons on May 10, 1915, Churchill had replied, rather coolly, “Merchant traffic must look after itself.”) But there were other secrets to protect, not just from domestic scrutiny, but also from German watchers—namely the fact that the Admiralty, through Room 40, had known so much about U-20’s travels leading up to the attack. One way to defend those secrets was to draw attention elsewhere. The Admiralty found added motivation to do so when, on May 12, wireless stations in Britain’s listening network intercepted a series of messages from the then homebound U-20, which upon entering the North Sea had resumed communication with its base at Emden. At the Admiralty these messages drew an unusual degree of attention. Room 40 asked all the stations that had intercepted them to confirm that they had transcribed them correctly and to provide signed and certified copies.

...[I]f the goal is a realistic sustainable future, then it’s necessary to take a look at what we can do to lengthen the lives of the products we’re going to buy anyway. So my ... answer to the question of how we can boost recycling rates is this: Demand that companies start designing products for repair, reuse, and recycling. Take, for example, the super-thin MacBook Air, a wonder of modern design packed into an aluminum case that’s barely bigger than a handful of documents in a manila envelope. At first glance, it would seem to be a sustainable wonder that uses fewer raw materials to do more. But that’s just the gloss; the reality is that the MacBook Air’s thin profile means that its components—memory chips, solid state drive, and processor—are packed so tightly in the case that there’s no room for upgrades (a point driven home by the unusual screws used to hold the case together, thus making home repair even more difficult). Even worse, from the perspective of recycling, the thin profile (and the tightly packed innards) means that the computer is exceptionally difficult to break down into individual components when it comes time to recycle it. In effect, the MacBook Air is a machine built to be shredded, not repaired, upgraded, and reused.

Achievement ceremonies are revealing about the need of the powerful to punish women through beauty, since the tension of having to repress alarm at female achievement is unusually formalized in them. Beauty myth insults tend to be blurted out at them like death jokes at a funeral. Memories of these achievement ceremonies are supposed to last like Polaroid snapshots that gel into permanent colors, souvenirs to keep of a hard race run; but for girls and young women, the myth keeps those colors always liquid so that, with a word, they can be smeared into the uniform shades of mud. At my college graduation, the commencement speaker, Dick Cavett—who had been a “brother” of the university president in an allmale secret society—was confronted by two thousand young female Yale graduates in mortarboards and academic gowns, and offered them this story: When he was at Yale there were no women. The women went to Vassar. There, they had nude photographs taken in gym class to check their posture. Some of the photos ended up in the pornography black market in New Haven. The punch line: The photos found no buyers. Whether or not the slur was deliberate, it was still effective: We may have been Elis but we would still not make pornography worth his buying. Today, three thousand men of the class of 1984 are sure they are graduates of that university, remembering commencement as they are meant to: proudly. But many of the two thousand women, when they can think of that day at all, recall the feelings of the powerless: exclusion and shame and impotent, complicit silence. We could not make a scene, as it was our parents’ great day for which they had traveled long distances; neither could they, out of the same concern for us. Beauty pornography makes an eating disease seem inevitable, even desirable, if a young woman is to consider herself sexual and valuable: Robin Lakoff and Raquel Scherr in Face Value found in 1984 that “among college women, ‘modern’ definitions of beauty—health, energy, self-confidence”—prevailed. “The bad news” is that they all had “only one overriding concern: the shape and weight of their bodies. They all wanted to lose 5–25 pounds, even though most [were] not remotely overweight. They went into great detail about every flaw in their anatomies, and told of the great disgust they felt every time they looked in the mirror.” The “great disgust” they feel comes from learning the rigid conventions of beauty pornography before they learn their own sexual value; in such an atmosphere, eating diseases make perfect sense.

His gaze was locked on the young woman approaching beside Lady Withram. Short, no more than five feet, with a pretty face, shiny, long, wavy midnight hair and more curves than his shield. He noted all that in an instant, his eyes traveling with appreciation over each asset before settling on her eyes. They were a color he’d never seen before in eyes, a combination of pale blue and green, almost teal with a darker rim circling the unusual irises. They were absolutely beautiful . . . and presently brimming with anxiety and fear. Before he’d even realized he was going to do it, Ross found himself moving around the table to approach the girl. Taking her hand in his, he placed it on his arm and peered solemnly down into her unusual eyes before announcing, “Well worth the wait.” He was pleased to see some of her fear dissipate. Just a little, but it was something. She blushed too, ducking her head as if unused to and embarrassed by such a compliment . . . and her fingers were trembling where they rested on his arm. She did not strike him as a light-skirt, nor was she sour faced or ugly, but she had the finest eyes he’d ever seen, and he wanted to see more of them, so Ross turned and escorted her to the table. He didn’t miss the audible sighs of relief from her parents at their backs. Nor did he miss Gilly’s muttered, “Bloody hell. He’s done fer now.” Judging

Tonight, however, Dickens struck him in a different light. Beneath the author’s sentimental pity for the weak and helpless, he could discern a revolting pleasure in cruelty and suffering, while the grotesque figures of the people in Cruikshank’s illustrations revealed too clearly the hideous distortions of their souls. What had seemed humorous now appeared diabolic, and in disgust at these two favourites he turned to Walter Pater for the repose and dignity of a classic spirit. But presently he wondered if this spirit were not in itself of a marble quality, frigid and lifeless, contrary to the purpose of nature. ‘I have often thought’, he said to himself, ‘that there is something evil in the austere worship of beauty for its own sake.’ He had never thought so before, but he liked to think that this impulse of fancy was the result of mature consideration, and with this satisfaction he composed himself for sleep. He woke two or three times in the night, an unusual occurrence, but he was glad of it, for each time he had been dreaming horribly of these blameless Victorian works… It turned out to be the Boy’s Gulliver’s Travels that Granny had given him, and Dicky had at last to explain his rage with the devil who wrote it to show that men were worse than beasts and the human race a washout. A boy who never had good school reports had no right to be so morbidly sensitive as to penetrate to the underlying cynicism of Swift’s delightful fable, and that moreover in the bright and carefully expurgated edition they bring out nowadays. Mr Corbett could not say he had ever noticed the cynicism himself, though he knew from the critical books it must be there, and with some annoyance he advised his son to take out a nice bright modern boy’s adventure story that could not depress anybody. Mr Corbett soon found that he too was ‘off reading’. Every new book seemed to him weak, tasteless and insipid; while his old and familiar books were depressing or even, in some obscure way, disgusting. Authors must all be filthy-minded; they probably wrote what they dared not express in their lives. Stevenson had said that literature was a morbid secretion; he read Stevenson again to discover his peculiar morbidity, and detected in his essays a self-pity masquerading as courage, and in Treasure Island an invalid’s sickly attraction to brutality. This gave him a zest to find out what he disliked so much, and his taste for reading revived as he explored with relish the hidden infirmities of minds that had been valued by fools as great and noble. He saw Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë as two unpleasant examples of spinsterhood; the one as a prying, sub-acid busybody in everyone else’s flirtations, the other as a raving, craving maenad seeking self-immolation on the altar of her frustrated passions. He compared Wordsworth’s love of nature to the monstrous egoism of an ancient bellwether, isolated from the flock.

If the past is a foreign country, it is a shockingly violent one. It is easy to forget how dangerous life used to be, how deeply brutality was once woven into the fabric of daily existence. Cultural memory pacifies the past, leaving us with pale souvenirs whose bloody origins have been bleached away. A woman donning a cross seldom reflects that this instrument of torture was a common punishment in the ancient world; nor does a person who speaks of a whipping boy ponder the old practice of flogging an innocent child in place of a misbehaving prince. We are surrounded by signs of the depravity of our ancestors’ way of life, but we are barely aware of them. Just as travel broadens the mind, a literal-minded tour of our cultural heritage can awaken us to how differently they did things in the past. In a century that began with 9/11, Iraq, and Darfur, the claim that we are living in an unusually peaceful time may strike you as somewhere between hallucinatory and obscene. I know from conversations and survey data that most people refuse to believe it.1 In succeeding chapters I will make the case with dates and data. But first I want to soften you up by reminding you of incriminating facts about the past that you have known all along. This is not just an exercise in persuasion. Scientists often probe their conclusions with a sanity check, a sampling of real-world phenomena to reassure themselves they haven’t overlooked some flaw in their methods and wandered into a preposterous conclusion. The vignettes in this chapter are a sanity check on the data to come.

In all your travels around Alagaësia, with Angela and without, you’ve never found anything that might explain this mystery? Or even just something that might be of use against Galbatorix.” I found you, didn’t I? “That’s not funny,” growled Eragon. “Blast it, you have to know something more.” I do not. “Think, then! If I can’t find some sort of help against Galbatorix, we’ll lose, Solembum. We’ll lose, and most of the Varden, including the werecats, will die.” Solembum hissed again. What do you expect of me, Eragon? I cannot invent help where none exists. Read the book. “We’ll be at Urû’baen before I can finish it. The book might as well not exist.” Solembum’s ears flattened again. That is not my fault. “I don’t care if it is. I just want a way to keep us from ending up dead or enslaved. Think! You have to know something else!” Solembum uttered a low, warbling growl. I do not. And-- “You have to, or we’re doomed!” Even as Eragon uttered the words, he saw a change come over the werecat. Solembum’s ears swiveled until they were upright, his whiskers relaxed, and his gaze softened, losing its hard-edged brilliance. At the same time, the werecat’s mind grew unusually empty, as if his consciousness had been stilled or removed. Eragon froze, uncertain. Then he felt Solembum say, with thoughts that were as flat and colorless as a pool of water beneath a wintry, cloud-ridden sky: Chapter forty-seven. Page three. Start with the second passage thereon. Solembum’s gaze sharpened, and his ears returned to their previous position. What? he said with obvious irritation. Why are you gaping at me like that? “What did you just say?” I said that I do not know anything else. And that-- “No, no, the other thing, about the chapter and page.” Do not toy with me. I said no such thing. “You did.” Solembum studied him for several seconds. Then, with thoughts that were overly calm, he said, Tell me exactly what you heard, Dragon Rider. So, Eragon repeated the words as closely as he could. When he finished, the werecat was silent for a while. I have no memory of that, he said. “What do you think it means?” It means that we should look and see what’s on page three of chapter forty-seven.

Radiation from the Big Bang may give us a clue to dark matter and dark energy. First of all, the echo, or afterglow, of the Big Bang is easy to detect. Our satellites have been able to detect this radiation to enormous accuracy. Photographs of this microwave background radiation show that it is remarkably smooth, with tiny ripples appearing on its surface. These ripples, in turn, represent tiny quantum fluctuations that existed at the instant of the Big Bang that were then magnified by the explosion. What is controversial, however, is that there appear to be irregularities, or blotches, in the background radiation that we cannot explain. There is some speculation that these strange blotches are the remnants of collisions with other universes. In particular, the CMB (cosmic microwave background) cold spot is an unusually cool mark on the otherwise uniform background radiation that some physicists have speculated might be the remnants of some type of connection or collision between our universe and a parallel universe at the beginning of time. If these strange markings represent our universe interacting with parallel universes, then the multiverse theory might become more plausible to skeptics. Already, there are plans to put detectors in space that can refine all these calculations, using space-based gravity wave detectors. LISA Back in 1916, Einstein showed that gravity could travel in waves. Like throwing a stone in a pond and witnessing the concentric, expanding rings it creates, Einstein predicted that swells of gravity would travel at the speed of light. Unfortunately, these would be so faint that he did not think we would find them anytime soon. He was right. It took until 2016, one hundred years after his original prediction, before gravity waves were observed. Signals from two black holes that collided in space about a billion years ago were captured by huge detectors. These detectors, built in Louisiana and Washington State, each occupy several square miles of real estate. They resemble a large L, with laser beams traveling down each leg of the L. When the two beams meet at the center, they create an interference pattern that is so sensitive to vibrations that they could detect this collision. For their pioneering work, three physicists, Rainer Weiss, Kip S. Thorne, and Barry C. Barish, won the Nobel Prize in 2017. For even greater sensitivity, there are plans to send gravity wave detectors into outer space. The project, known as the laser interferometry space antenna (LISA), might be able to pick up vibrations from the instant of the Big Bang itself. One version of the LISA consists of three separate satellites in space, each connected to the others by a network of laser beams. The triangle is about a million miles on each side.

Dr. Hobson (with Dr. Robert McCarley) made history by proposing the first serious challenge to Freud’s theory of dreams, called the “activation synthesis theory.” In 1977, they proposed the idea that dreams originate from random neural firings in the brain stem, which travel up to the cortex, which then tries to make sense of these random signals. The key to dreams lies in nodes found in the brain stem, the oldest part of the brain, which squirts out special chemicals, called adrenergics, that keep us alert. As we go to sleep, the brain stem activates another system, the cholinergic, which emits chemicals that put us in a dream state. As we dream, cholinergic neurons in the brain stem begin to fire, setting off erratic pulses of electrical energy called PGO (pontine-geniculate-occipital) waves. These waves travel up the brain stem into the visual cortex, stimulating it to create dreams. Cells in the visual cortex begin to resonate hundreds of times per second in an irregular fashion, which is perhaps responsible for the sometimes incoherent nature of dreams. This system also emits chemicals that decouple parts of the brain involved with reason and logic. The lack of checks coming from the prefrontal and orbitofrontal cortices, along with the brain becoming extremely sensitive to stray thoughts, may account for the bizarre, erratic nature of dreams. Studies have shown that it is possible to enter the cholinergic state without sleep. Dr. Edgar Garcia-Rill of the University of Arkansas claims that meditation, worrying, or being placed in an isolation tank can induce this cholinergic state. Pilots and drivers facing the monotony of a blank windshield for many hours may also enter this state. In his research, he has found that schizophrenics have an unusually large number of cholinergic neurons in their brain stem, which may explain some of their hallucinations. To make his studies more efficient, Dr. Allan Hobson had his subjects put on a special nightcap that can automatically record data during a dream. One sensor connected to the nightcap registers the movements of a person’s head (because head movements usually occur when dreams end). Another sensor measures movements of the eyelids (because REM sleep causes eyelids to move). When his subjects wake up, they immediately record what they dreamed about, and the information from the nightcap is fed into a computer. In this way, Dr. Hobson has accumulated a vast amount of information about dreams. So what is the meaning of dreams? I asked him. He dismisses what he calls the “mystique of fortune-cookie dream interpretation.” He does not see any hidden message from the cosmos in dreams. Instead, he believes that after the PGO waves surge from the brain stem into the cortical areas, the cortex is trying to make sense of these erratic signals and winds up creating a narrative out of them: a dream.

Here before you lies the memorial to St. Cefnogwr, though he is not buried here, of course.” At her words, an uncanny knowing flushed through Katy and, crazy-of-crazy, transfixed her. “Why? Where is he?” Traci stepped forward, hand on her hip. A you’re-right-on-cue look crossed the guide’s face. She pointed to the ceiling. Traci scoffed. “I meant, where’s the body?” Her American southern accent lent a strange contrast to her skepticism. Again, the tour guide’s arthritic finger pointed upward, and a smile tugged at her lips, the smokers’ wrinkles on her upper lip smoothing out. “That’s the miracle that made him a saint, you see. Throughout the twelve hundreds, the Welsh struggled to maintain our independence from the English. During Madog’s Rebellion in 1294, St. Cefnogwr, a noble Norman-English knight, turned against his liege lord and sided with the Welsh—” “Norman-English?” Katy frowned, her voice raspy in her dry throat. “Why would a Norman have a Welsh name and side with the Welsh?” She might be an American, but her years living in England had taught her that was unusual. “The English nicknamed him. It means ‘sympathizer’ in Welsh. The knight was captured and, for his crime, sentenced to hang. As he swung, the rope creaking in the crowd’s silence, an angel of mercy swooped down and—” She clapped her hands in one decisive smack, and everyone jumped. “The rope dangled empty, free of its burden. Proof, we say, of his noble cause. He’s been venerated ever since as a Welsh hero.” Another chill danced over Katy’s skin. A chill that flashed warm as the story seeped into her. Familiar. Achingly familiar. Unease followed—this existential stuff was so not her. “His rescue by an angel was enough to make him a saint?” ever-practical Traci asked. “Unofficially. The Welsh named him one, and eventually it became a fait accompli. Now, please follow me.” The tour guide stepped toward a side door. Katy let the others pass and approached the knight covered in chainmail and other medieval-looking doodads. Only his face peeked out from a tight-fitting, chainmail hoodie-thing. One hand gripped a shield, the other, a sword. She touched his straight nose, the marble a cool kiss against her finger. So. This person had lived about seven hundred years ago. His angular features were starkly masculine. Probably had women admiring them in the flesh. Had he loved? An odd…void bloomed within, tugging at her, as if it were the absence of a feeling seeking wholeness. Evidence of past lives frozen in time always made her feel…disconnected. Disconnected and disturbed. Unable to grasp some larger meaning. Especially since Isabelle was in the past now too, instead of here as her maid of honor. She traced along the knight’s torso, the bumps from the carved chainmail teasing her fingers. “The tour group is getting on the bus. Hurry.” Traci’s voice came from the door. “Coming.” One last glance at her knight. Katy ran a finger down his strong nose again. “Bye,” she whispered.

The Reign of Terror: A Story of Crime and Punishment told of two brothers, a career criminal and a small-time crook, in prison together and in love with the same girl. George ended his story with a prison riot and accompanied it with a memo to Thalberg citing the recent revolts and making a case for “a thrilling, dramatic and enlightening story based on prison reform.” --- Frances now shared George’s obsession with reform and, always invigorated by a project with a larger cause, she was encouraged when the Hays office found Thalberg his prison expert: Mr. P. W. Garrett, the general secretary of the National Society of Penal Information. Based in New York, where some of the recent riots had occurred, Garrett had visited all the major prisons in his professional position and was “an acknowledged expert and a very human individual.” He agreed to come to California to work with Frances for several weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas for a total of kr 4,470.62 plus expenses. Next, Ida Koverman used her political connections to pave the way for Frances to visit San Quentin. Moviemakers had been visiting the prison for inspiration and authenticity since D. W. Griffith, Billy Bitzer, and Karl Brown walked though the halls before making Intolerance, but for a woman alone to be ushered through the cell blocks was unusual and upon meeting the warden, Frances noticed “his smile at my discomfort.” Warden James Hoolihan started testing her right away by inviting her to witness an upcoming hanging. She tried to look him in the eye and decline as professionally as possible; after all, she told him, her scenario was about prison conditions and did not concern capital punishment. Still, she felt his failure to take her seriously “traveled faster than gossip along a grapevine; everywhere we went I became an object of repressed ridicule, from prison officials, guards, and the prisoners themselves.” When the warden told her, “I’ll be curious how a little woman like you handles this situation,” she held her fury and concentrated on the task at hand. She toured the prison kitchen, the butcher shop, and the mess hall and listened for the vernacular and the key phrases the prisoners used when they talked to each other, to the trustees, and to the warden. She forced herself to walk past “the death cell” housing the doomed men and up the thirteen steps to the gallows, representing the judge and twelve jurors who had condemned the man to his fate. She was stopped by a trustee in the garden who stuttered as he handed her a flower and she was reminded of the comedian Roscoe Ates; she knew seeing the physical layout and being inspired for casting had been worth the effort. --- Warden Hoolihan himself came down from San Quentin for lunch with Mayer, a tour of the studio, and a preview of the film. Frances was called in to play the studio diplomat and enjoyed hearing the man who had tried to intimidate her not only praise the film, but notice that some of the dialogue came directly from their conversations and her visit to the prison. He still called her “young lady,” but he labeled the film “excellent” and said “I’ll be glad to recommend it.” ---- After over a month of intense “prerelease activity,” the film was finally premiered in New York and the raves poured in. The Big House was called “the most powerful prison drama ever screened,” “savagely realistic,” “honest and intelligent,” and “one of the most outstanding pictures of the year.

Appreciate the comfortable (responsibly). Producing in the evening can be an experience like no other. With the comfortable, ongoing hum of the engine and the nights your atmosphere, generating can be almost like traveling through place. Producing in the evening seems unusual, fun, and even exciting — for some people, it’s one of life’s simplest yet most excessive entertainment. It’s definitely outstanding have fun with a evening produce, but don’t neglect to focus on what’s most important of all — your security and the security of other drivers. Always keep in ideas that getting sent straight while generating can be dangerous (especially at night), so keep your interest on the road. If you’re confident in your secured generating workouts, you’ll be able to successfully relax, notice in, and revel in your ride! Put your returning viewpoint reflection in its “flipped down” or “night” strategy to reduce returning front aspect part aspect lighting glare. Check all your car lighting constantly, especially if upcoming winter year time mean that you will be doing more generating after dark. To make the process simpler, you can take changes with a friend working the lighting and watching to see that they all come on, or you can notice your own reflection in the ms ms ms ms windows of a glass-fronted developing. You have purchased some car parts and accessories. Block out interruptions while generating, but don’t focus definitely on the road. Doing so may put you in a situation of hypnosis and you may even mentally “blank” for a few a few several weeks. Keep your viewpoint moving around the car and landscapes. Some car gadgets should be set progressively. Always use a car car car car seatbelt and encourage your guests to do the same.Do not produce drunk. Never produce without a legal drivers’ certification approved in your name. Don’t believe the town story that sunglasses with yellow-colored or bright orange sketchy connections help you see better in the evening. Wearing them in the evening may make aspects seem less heavy. Always carry around your drivers’ certification to prevent police from getting suspicious of a situation that isn’t there. Do not produce when you are tired. In some countries, generating while feeling sleepy issues as impacted generating. Regardless of the law, it’s dangerous.

An unusually large, rare, golden wolf trotted out of the timberline, circled the area warily, and sat down on its haunches only feet from Jacques. It watched him steadily with its strange golden eyes, completely unafraid. It seemed not to be affected by the fire, the lightning, or the Carpathian male. Jacques watched the animal equally intently, certain he was facing more than a wolf. The creature did not make an attempt to use the common mental path to communicate. It simply watched him, taking in the bizarre scene, the golden eyes never wavering. A humorless smile curved Jacques’ hard mouth. “If you are looking for action tonight, I am too tired to oblige you, and far too hungry.” The wolf’s shape contorted, stretched, shimmered in the smoke of the fire, and soon a large, heavily muscled man was facing Jacques. His long, shaggy mane of hair was blond, his eyes golden, his body perfectly balanced. “You are Jacques, brother to Mikhail. I heard you were dead.” “That is the story going around,” Jacques assented warily. “You have no memory of me? I am Julian, brother to Aidan. I have been away these last long years. The far-off mountains, the places without people, are my home.” “The last I heard, you were fighting wars in distant lands.” “When the mood is upon me, I fight where it is needed,” Julian agreed. “I see you do also. The vampire lies dead, and you are pale beyond imagination.” Jacques’ smile was grim. “Do not allow my color to fool you.” “I am no vampire yet, and if ever I fear turning, I will go to Aidan, and he will destroy me if I cannot do so myself. If you wish to take blood, then I offer it freely. The healer knows me; you can ask him if I am a reliable resource.” There was the slightest of smiles, a self-mocking humor. “What are you doing in these parts?” Jacques asked suspiciously. “I was traveling through, on my way to the United States, when I heard the butchers were back, and I thought I would make myself useful to our people for a change.” Jacques found himself admiring Julian’s answers. This was a man not in the least worried about anyone’s opinion or impression of him. He was self-contained, at ease with himself. It didn’t bother him at all that Jacques was suspicious, that he was firing questions at him. Healer, hear me. I have need of blood, and this one before me, Julian, the golden twin, has said you will vouch for him. No one can vouch for one such as Julian. He is a loner, a law unto himself, but his blood is untainted. If Julian turns, it will be Aidan or I who hunts him, no others. Avail yourself of what he offers. “Did he give me a good recommendation?” Julian’s smile was frankly sardonic. “The healer never gives good recommendation. You are not his favorite, but he agrees there would be no harm.” Julian laughed softly, put his wrist to his mouth and bit, then casually reached out to offer his life-giving fluid to Jacques. “I am too much like him, a loner, one who studies too much. I dabble in things better left alone. I fear Gregori has given up on me.” He didn’t sound worried about it.

Since he has been home, he has felt unusually tender about his wife and guilty over his long absences. But he can’t tell what she feels about him. Norma Jean has never complained about his traveling; she has never made hurt remarks, like calling his truck a “widow-maker.” He is reasonably certain she has been faithful to him, but he wishes she would celebrate his permanent homecoming more happily. Norma Jean is often startled to find Leroy at home, and he thinks she seems a little disappointed about it.

Two men were traveling from one town to another. They came to a stream that had risen due to heavy rainfall. Just when they were about to cross the water, they noticed a young, beautiful woman standing there all alone, in need of help. One of the men immediately went to her side. He picked the woman up and carried her in his arms across the stream. Then he dropped her there, waved good-bye, and the two men went their way. During the rest of the trip, the second traveler was unusually silent and sullen, not responding to his friend’s questions. After several hours of sulking, unable to keep silent anymore, he said, “Why did you touch that woman? She could have seduced you! Men and women cannot come into contact like that!” The first man responded calmly, “My friend, I carried the woman across the stream, and that is where I left her. It is you who have been carrying her ever since.

believe that the only reason God took me to hell was to draw attention to His Word on this subject. It is not that He needs my help or anybody else’s. However, I believe time is getting short, and there are some unusual things God is doing in the earth today to help people awaken to the truth. He is imploring people to listen to His Word. This is not a condemning message but a warning message. God does not want anyone to go down the heavily traveled road that many are on.

The people of the Kumuhonua and Pa‘ao genealogies probably left at a later date. Their genealogies continue on through Lua Nu‘u and his descendants up until the twelve sons of Kinilau-a-Mano (Jacob). The story of a Jonah-like character, Naula-a-Maihea, is the last of the Hawaiian legends which correspond to the Hebrew. However, there is a large gap in the legends between the Kāne-Apua (Moses) story which occurred around 1450 B.C. and the story of Naula-a-Maihea (Jonah) which occurred around 760 B.C. The absence of any of the great Biblical events that occurred during this 650-year period in any of the Polynesian legends is glaring. Why were great events of Hebrew history like the story of Joshua and the walls of Jericho, Samson and Delilah, and David and Goliath missing? Why was there only the story of Jonah which occurred long after these events? The answer to this problem could be that these Proto-Polynesians (whether they were actually a part of Israel or were a people of the area who adopted the Hebrew genealogies and legends) probably left the Middle East shortly after the time of Moses. They then traveled to their next stop in Irihia (India). Sea trade had been flourishing between the Middle East and India for over a thousand years. Vessels would sail down the Tigris and Euphrates rivers to the Persian Gulf and from there sail along the coast of the Arabian Sea to the Indus River and other trading ports of India. The unusual story of Jonah would surely be told by Ninevite traders (Nineveh was the city Jonah went to) and could have been picked up by the Proto-Polynesian seamen of Irihia.

from around the precious plants. The fresh air was exhilarating and John’s aunt chatted merrily about times gone by and what Italy had been like when she and John’s mother were children. ‘But that was before the war,’ she sighed. ‘It is far behind us.’ As Mary Anne pulled Mathilda’s blanket a little higher around the cherry-pink face, a thought occurred to her. ‘I think I have something that used to belong to your sister – perhaps to you too.’ ‘Oh?’ Maria eyed her quizzically. ‘Yes,’ said Mary Anne, and went on to tell her about the time John had come to borrow money against a silver crucifix that she’d guessed had belonged to his mother. ‘He’d wanted the money for Daw’s engagement and wedding ring. I gave him the money but never sold the cross on. I couldn’t do it somehow. I kept thinking that one day he might want it back.’ ‘You have this?’ said Maria, her eyes shining. ‘You remember it?’ Maria clapped her hands together. ‘Of course I do!’ ‘Michael found it in the ruins of the pawn shop. I still have it.’ She turned and looked with gratitude into Maria’s dark eyes. ‘You’ve been so kind to me. You must have it back.’ Maria’s eyes brimmed with tears. ‘It is a pleasure. I cannot thank you enough.’ They sat on a park bench. Mathilda was sitting up, observing everything with unusual interest. ‘She’s a lovely child,’ said Maria. Mary Anne murmured a reply. Her eyes were elsewhere, her attention caught by a man in a trench coat walking along the path at the side of the bowling green. She fancied he had been staring at them. 19 Lizzie and the wing commander had been travelling between airfields, ‘co-ordinating events’ as Hunter liked to call it, when he’d spotted a dog fight in the distance. Streaks of white vapour trail criss-crossed the sky as the Messerschmitt and the Spitfire locked horns above the English countryside. In their midst was a low-flying bomber, the bone of contention between the two. Hunter got out a pair of binoculars. Lizzie shaded her eyes with her hand. ‘They’re chasing the bomber.’ ‘Correction,’ Hunter said slowly. ‘The Spitfire is chasing the

In fact, there are many lines of evidence to suggest that apes were specially selected to have unusually low levels of physical activity to help them thrive in the rain forest. As we saw, apes usually don’t need to travel far to get food, and their highly fibrous diet requires them to spend much time resting and digesting between bouts of feeding. In addition, their adaptations to climb trees make them outlandishly inefficient at walking. A typical chimpanzee spends more than twice as much energy to walk a mile as most mammals, including humans.23 When walking is so calorically costly, natural selection inevitably pushes apes to spend as little energy as possible schlepping about the forest so they can devote as much energy as possible to reproduction. Apes are adapted to be couch potatoes.

Generally when a man in uniform has something unusual brought to his attention, his instinct is to stop it.

The Insular Cases are far less well-known. Until very recently, it was not unusual for constitutional scholars to have never heard of them. But they are nevertheless still on the books, and they are still cited as good law. The court has repeatedly upheld the principle that the Constitution applies to some parts of the country but not others. That’s why a citizen on the mainland has a constitutional right to trial by jury, but when that citizen travels to Puerto Rico, the right vanishes.

Despite his late and haphazard start, Cecchini also became a renowned teacher of both jazz and classical guitar. Students traveled from out of state to pick his brain, and by the early 1980s lines formed down the stairs of his Chicago school in the evenings. His own formal training, of course, had been those free clarinet lessons. “I’d say I’m 98 percent self-taught,” he told me. He switched between instruments and found his way through trial and error. It might sound unusual, but when Cecchini reeled off legends he played with or admired, there was not a Tiger among them.

I'll give you an actual example. Pamela Yellen, the CEO of the Prospecting & Marketing Institute, based in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and I were conducting a multiday seminar for her clients — corporate executives and general agents from life insurance companies — about new methods of recruiting agents. Even though the attendees had paid a very high per-person fee to be there, most had traveled great distances, and the subject was of critical importance to them, we both noticed that on breaks, what most of them were talking about was where they were going to go play golf that evening when the seminar let out, the next morning before it started, or the day afterward. Both Pamela and I made note of how important it was to these clients of hers to get out on the golf course. This led to one of the most unusual ads Pamela has ever written and run in her own industry's trade journals, with the headline: “Puts Recruiting on Autopilot So You Can Go Play Golf!” The entire ad is reproduced on the following page, Exhibit #3. As you'll see, it sold the system we devised for insurance agent recruiting, but it did so circuitously, by emphasizing the hidden benefit: you'll get the job done with less time invested, so you can spend more time on the golf course.

MY FIRST VISIT to the Oval took place just days after the election, when, following a long tradition, the Bushes invited Michelle and me for a tour of our soon-to-be home. Riding in a Secret Service vehicle, the two of us traveled the winding arc of the South Lawn entrance to the White House, trying to process the fact that in less than three months we’d be moving in. The day was sunny and warm, the trees still flush with leaves, and the Rose Garden overflowing with flowers. Washington’s prolonged fall provided a welcome respite, for in Chicago the weather had quickly turned cold and dark, an arctic wind stripping the trees bare of leaves, as if the unusually mild weather we had enjoyed on election night had been merely part of an elaborate set, to be dismantled as soon as the celebration was done.

We know a very successful executive who, upon retirement, put all his investments into high-quality, diversified, municipal bonds. The income from the bonds is more than sufficient for his family’s lifestyle. This executive wants to spend his time traveling and on the golf course—not managing a complex portfolio of assorted securities. His simple portfolio may be unusual, but we think it’s probably a very suitable portfolio for him. However, most of us want a return greater than is available from savings, CDs, and bonds. This is why we use stocks to provide the growth and additional income needed to meet our goals. DESIGNING OUR PERSONAL ASSET ALLOCATION PLAN We have discussed the Efficient Market Theory and Modern Portfolio Theory.

Life as an Enron employee was good. Prestwood’s annual salary rose steadily to sixty-five thousand dollars, with additional retirement benefits paid in Enron stock. When Houston Natural and Internorth had merged, all of Prestwood’s investments were automatically converted to Enron stock. He continued to set aside money in the company’s retirement fund, buying even more stock. Internally, the company relentlessly promoted employee stock ownership. Newsletters touted Enron’s growth as “simply stunning,” and Lay, at company events, urged employees to buy more stock. To Prestwood, it didn’t seem like a problem that his future was tied directly to Enron’s. Enron had committed to him, and he was showing his gratitude. “To me, this is the American way, loyalty to your employer,” he says. Prestwood was loyal to the bitter end. When he retired in 2000, he had accumulated 13,500 shares of Enron stock, worth $1.3 million at their peak. Then, at age sixty-eight, Prestwood suddenly lost his entire Enron nest egg. He now survives on a previous employer’s pension of $521 a month and a Social Security check of $1,294. “There aint no such thing as a dream anymore,” he says. He lives on a three-acre farm north of Houston willed to him as a baby in 1938 after his mother died. “I hadn’t planned much for the retirement. Wanted to go fishing, hunting. I was gonna travel a little.” Now he’ll sell his family’s land. Has to, he says. He is still paying off his mortgage.7 In some respects, Prestwood’s case is not unusual. Often people do not diversify at all, and sometimes employees invest a lot of their money in their employer’s stock. Amazing but true: five million Americans have more than 60 percent of their retirement savings in company stock.8 This concentration is risky on two counts. First, a single security is much riskier than the portfolios offered by mutual funds. Second, as employees of Enron and WorldCom discovered the hard way, workers risk losing both their jobs and the bulk of their retirement savings all at once.

The similarities in the physiological characteristics of Leopardi and Nietzsche are especially remarkable. The same sensitivity toward weather and seasons, toward place and environment, are found in both. Leopardi feels the slightest change in the thermometer and barometer. He could create only during the summer; he traveled about, always looking for the most suitable location for his creative activity. Nietzsche expresses himself about such peculiarities of his nature in the following manner: “Now after long practice, when I observe the effects of climatic and meteorological nature upon myself, as upon a very delicate and reliable instrument, and after a short journey, perhaps from Turin to Milan, calculate the change in the degree of humidity calculated physiologically in myself, then I look with horror at the sinister fact that my life until the last ten years, the most dangerous years, has always been spent in locations treacherous and absolutely forbidden to me. Naumburg, Schulpforta, Thuringia, in fact, Bonn, Liepzig, Basel, Venice, — all of them places of misfortune for my physiology. ...” Connected with this unusual sensitivity in Leopardi as well as in Nietzsche, is a contempt for all altruistic feelings. Both of them had to overcome this in order to be able to tolerate mankind. From Nietzsche's own words one can see that his shyness in presence of strong impressions, of attractions which demand too much of his sensitivity, fill him with suspicion toward selfless impulses.

I have been lucky to see many parts of the world denied to others. A special trip was one I made to Mongolia. It is a remarkable and unusual country. Do get there before it changes.

Alexis de Tocqueville was the first to master the grammar of print and typography. He was thus able to read off the message of coming change in France and America as if he were reading aloud from a text that had been handed to him. In fact, the nineteenth century in France and in America was just such an open book to de Tocqueville because he had learned the grammar of print. So he, also, knew when that grammar did not apply. He was asked why he did not write a book on England, since he knew and admired England. He replied: One would have to have an unusual degree of philosophical folly to believe oneself able to judge England in six months. A year always seemed to me too short a time in which to appreciate the United States properly, and it is much easier to acquire clear and precise notions about the American Union than about Great Britain. In America all laws derive in a sense from the same line of thought. The whole of society, so to speak, is founded upon a single fact; everything springs from a simple principle. One could compare America to a forest pierced by a multitude of straight roads all converging on the same point. One has only to find the center and everything is revealed at a glance. But in England the paths run criss-cross, and it is only by travelling down each one of them that one can build up a picture of the whole.

A figure is an unusual choice. Robert Frost claimed that his choosing the road less taken made all the difference. Almost all of us will be taking roads more frequently travelled than Frost's, but they may still be among the less travelled.

«Anna has a quality.» Matthew raised a thoughtful eyebrow. «The French would call it jolie laide.» Cordelia knew French well enough to frown. «Pretty-ugly? She's not ugly!» «It doesn't mean that,» Matthew said. «It means unusually pretty. Oddly beautiful. It denotes having a face with character.» His gaze traveled from the top of her hair to the tips of her shoes. «Like you have.»

Fluttering! The beating picked up. I moved closer and closer until I stopped in front of Red. She wore a look of bewilderment with her hand on her waist, but that didn’t deter me. I traveled down her body until I stopped at her stomach. That unusual sound picked up, and I listened closer. Then I heard it clear as day.

I have pointed out that the concept current among most flying-saucer enthusiasts that the unidentified flying objects are simply craft used by visitors from another planet is naive. The explanation is too simple-minded to account for the diversity of the reported behavior of the occupants and their percieved interaction with human beings. Could this concept serve precisely a diversionary role in masking the real, infinitely more complex nature of the technology that gives rise to the sightings? [...] Here then, is a brief statement of five new propositions based upon the material we have reviewed so far: 1. The things we call unidentified flying objects are neither objects nor flying. They can dematerialize, as some reliable photographs seem to show, and they violate the laws of motion as we know them. 2. UFOs have been seen throughout history and have consistently recieved (or provided) their own explanation within the framework of each culture. In antiquity their occupants were regarded as gods; in medieval times, as magicians; in the nineteenth century, as scientific geniuses; in our own time, as interplanetary travelers. (Statements made by occupants of the 1897 airship included such declarations as "We are from Kansas" and even "We are from anywhere... but we'll be in Greece tomorrow.") 3. UFO reports are not necessarily caused by visits from space travelers. The phenomenon could be a manifestation of a much more complex technology. If time and space are not as simple in structure as physicists have assumed until now, then the question "where do they come from?" may be meaningless; they could come from a place in time. If consciousness can be manifested outside the body, then the range of hypotheses can be even wider. 4. The key to an understanding of the phenomenon lies in the psychic effects it produces (or the psychic awareness it makes possible) in its observers. Their lives are often deeply changed, and they develop unusual talents with which they may find it difficult to cope. The proportion of witnesses who do come forward and publish accounts of these experiences is quite low; most of them choose to remain silent. 5. Contact between human percipients and the UFO phenomenon always occurs under conditions controlled by the latter. Its characteristic feature is a factor of absurdity that leads to a rejection of the story by the upper layers of the target society and an absorption at a deep unconscious level of the symbols conveyed by the encounter. The mechanism of this resonance between the UFO symbol and the archetypes of the human unconscious has been abundantly demonstrated by Carl Jung, whose book Flying Saucers makes many references to the age-old significance of the signs in the sky. I am not regarding the phenomenon of the UFOs as the unknowable, uncontrollable game of a higher order of beings. Neither is it likely, in my view, that an encounter with UFOs would add to the human being anything it did not already possess. Everything works as if the phenomenon were the product of a technology that followed well-defined rules and patterns, though fantastic by ordinary human standards. It has so far posed no apparent threat to national defense and seems to be indifferent to the welfare of individual witnesses, leading many to assume that we may be dealing with a still-undiscovered natural occurrence ("It cannot be intelligent," say some people, "because it does not attack us!"). But its impact in shaping man's long-term creativity and unconscious impulses is probably enormous. The fact that we have no methodology to deal with such an impact is only an indication of how little we know about our own psychic world.

Verse 3:1 seems to be an anachronism. It describes Moses traveling to the “mountain of God.” Mount Sinai did not become the “mountain of God” until the Ten Commandments were revealed there. Ehrlich: Even before the Decalogue was revealed, the Israelites thought that this was God’s mountain because God lived there. (This is similar to the Greek notion that the gods dwelt on Olympus. Similarly, some scholars translate God’s name El Shaddai as “Mountain God,” referring to Sinai. El Shaddai was also the name of a Mesopotamian god.) Rashi writes: The Torah calls it “mountain of God” even though this name was only appropriate later, because it would be called so later. (By using the name now, Bible readers would understand the events better. Anachronistic usages are not unusual in the Bible.)

Engineer’s fascination with CPVC began in the mid-1990s. During this period, in the construction and plumbing industry, pipes were still made of iron and copper. Engineer saw that corrosion was a major problem with galvanized pipes and India was materially behind the evolution curve in the use of plastics for pipes. In the United States, CPVC was the new anti-corrosion solution for plastic pipes, which was swiftly replacing metal (iron and copper) pipes in industrial applications. CPVC was also a superior product compared to PVC because of higher ductile strength, which gave it the ability to handle hot water up to 200 degrees Fahrenheit (93° Celsius) (PVC can handle hot water only up to 140 degrees Fahrenheit [60° Celsius]). B.F. Goodrich (now known as Lubrizol) held the patent for CPVC resin technology, and Engineer decided to tie up with them to bring CPVC to India. He travelled to the United States to forge a techno-financial joint venture (JV) deal with Thompson Plastics of USA, which provided Astral with the technical know-how for setting up the CPVC plant. Astral also acquired the licence for CPVC resin procurement from Lubrizol (the first Indian company to do so). With a JV partner on board and a licence in his hand, Engineer set up Astral Poly Technik in March 1996. Thompson put up 20 per cent of equity for the company and Engineer approached his uncle to fund another 20 per cent. For his personal equity contribution, Engineer sold his house in Ahmedabad. I met Engineer at Astral’s corporate office located off the bustling Sarkhej–Gandhinagar Highway and behind the prestigious Rajpath Club in Ahmedabad. Recalling those early days, Engineer told me, ‘There was a time when everything my father-in-law and I owned was mortgaged to build Astral.

When he got a good look at her, though, he found himself in the unusual position of having completely lost the ability to speak. Millie’s curly hair was tied back with a ribbon, making her appear remarkably young, while also lending her a rather flirty attitude. His gaze traveled from her hair to her face, and he felt his breath catch in his throat when he took note of the paleness of her skin, the panic in her eyes, and the slight trembling of her lips. A scratch marred her cheek, and as his gaze drifted down her person to make certain she wasn’t injured anywhere else, he blinked and blinked again. “Are you wearing . . . pants?” “Well, yes,” she said, right before she sent him the smallest of grins. The grin hit him like a fist to the stomach, and right there and then, in the midst of the tree, he finally realized what it was about his life that had changed. He, Everett Mulberry, one of society’s highest members, was attracted to Miss Millie Longfellow, the . . . nanny. It was completely unacceptable, ridiculous even, and almost seemed like a story Jane Austen would have penned. In fact . . . him being attracted to Millie was remarkably similar to the Pride and Prejudice story he hadn’t picked up for a day or two. And he realized now that he certainly wasn’t going to finish because . . . if Mr. Darcy did indeed end up with Miss Elizabeth, well, it was a silly fairy tale, plain and simple. He didn’t believe in fairy tales, even if Oliver seemed to have experienced one, but . . . no—he would not allow himself to think in that direction. The question that remained now, though, was how was he going to overcome this attraction—if that’s what he was actually feeling—for Millie? She

This attitude is by no means unusual, even in Bagan. Nearly a hundred years ago, British writer Somerset Maugham passed through the region, recounting the visit in his book The Gentleman in the Parlour. Maugham enjoyed Bagan, calling it a “strange and melancholy spot,” but had no interest in exhausting himself through obsessive temple-hopping: “My curiosity,” he wrote, “was satisfied with a visit to half a dozen of the pagodas.” One night, as Maugham relaxed on the veranda of his guesthouse, a fellow traveler joined the author and began explaining the particulars of several notable temples—when they were built, under what king, etc. His lecture fell on deaf ears: But I did not want to know the facts he gave me. What did it matter to me what kings had reigned there, what battles they had fought and what lands they had conquered? I was content to see them as a low relief on a temple wall in a long procession, with their hieratic attitudes, seated on a throne and receiving gifts from the envoys of subjugated nations, or else, with a confusion of spears, in the hurry and skelter of chariots, in the turmoil of battle. No, no, no, that won’t do, said his companion. Facts and context are what matter, he insisted: “I want to know things. Whenever I go anywhere I read everything about it that has been written…. I am a mine of information.” To which Maugham replied, “But what is the good of information that means nothing to you? Information for its own sake is like a flight of steps that leads to a blank wall.” It is better, Maugham would probably say, to simply sit back and enjoy the view.

Tesla applied for a patent on an electrical coil that is the most likely candidate for a non mechanical successor of his energy extractor. This is his “Coil for Electro magnets,” patent #512,340. It is a curious design, unlike an ordinary coil made by turning wire on a tube form, this one uses two wires laid next to each other on a form but with the end of the first one connected to the beginning of the second one. In the patent Tesla explains that this double coil will store many times the energy of a conventional coil.   The patent, however, gives no hint of what might have been its more unusual capability. In an article for Century Magazine, Tesla compares extracting energy from the environment to the work of other scientists who were, at that time, learning to condense atmospheric gases into liquids. In particular, he cited the work of a Dr. Karl Linde who had discovered what Tesla described as a self-cooling method for liquefying air. As Tesla said, “This was the only experimental proof which I was still wanting that energy was obtainable from the medium in the manner contemplated by me.” What ties the Linde work with Tesla's electromagnet coil is that both of them used a double path for the material they were working with. Linde had a compressor to pump the air to a high pressure, let the pressure fall as it traveled through a tube, and then used that cooled air to reduce the temperature of the incoming air by having it travel back up the first tube through a second tube enclosing the first. The already cooled air added to the cooling process of the machine and quickly condensed the gases to a liquid. Tesla's intent was to condense the energy trapped between the earth and its upper atmosphere and to turn it into an electric current. He pictured the sun as an immense ball of electricity, positively charged with a potential of some 200 billion volts. The Earth, on the other hand, is charged with negative electricity. The tremendous electrical force between these two bodies constituted, at least in part, what he called cosmic-energy. It varied from night to day and from season to season but it is always present. Tesla's patents for electrical generators and motors were granted in the late 1880's. During the 1890's the large electric power industry, in the form of Westinghouse and General Electric, came into being. With tens of millions of dollars invested in plants and equipment, the industry was not about to abandon a very profitable ten-year-old technology for yet another new one. Tesla saw that profits could be made from the self-acting generator, but somewhere along the line, it was pointed out to him, the negative impact the device would have on the newly emerging technological revolution of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. At the end of his article in Century he wrote: “I worked for a long time fully convinced that the practical realization of the method of obtaining energy from the sun would be of incalculable industrial value, but the continued study of the subject revealed the fact that while it will be commercially profitable if my expectations are well founded, it will not be so to an extraordinary degree.

Hutchison Effect The Canadian inventor John Hutchison is an enigma. He is credited with one of science's most unusual and controversial discoveries. It is described as a "highly-anomalous electromagnetic effect which causes the jellification of metals, spontaneous levitation of common substances, and other effects." It is known as the Hutchison Effect, or the H-Effect for short. What the H-Effect is purported to do is nothing short of extraordinary. It is said to cause objects to defy gravity, cause metal to spontaneously fracture, cause dissimilar materials to fuse (such as metal and wood), and other strange phenomena.

his sophomore year, Ben and Simon were waiting inside the doors, just like always.

the leader of the troupe, looked carefully at the girl in front of him. She was a real windfall, and since she herself was prepared to starve with them, he had no objection. She might even, if she had talent as she said, be good for the troupe. For years now he’d been traveling all over Greece. He had given performances in cafés, in the open air, even in barns. Once, when he was young, he had begun his career with lots of dreams, and he’d played beside some serious actors of the day. He’d managed to make a name for himself, but he very soon started to get into the drink. The beginning of the end had arrived, but he hadn’t understood it at the time. He began to forget his words onstage and to delay his entrances, creating gaps in the performance. Soon he stopped being in demand. When he met Zoe, he stopped drinking, but it was too late. Nobody trusted him, nobody would offer him even a small role. But the bug for acting didn’t leave him. He formed his own troupe and from then on he traveled around the countryside. A lot of people had been with him and moved on. Some were real actors and some didn’t want to believe that they would never become actors. Very occasionally, real talent had appeared beside him, but precisely because of that talent they always left for some theater in Athens. He had suffered hundreds of humiliations. Frustrated by the troupe’s poor performances, audiences often threw whatever they found at them, forcing the show to end. And it wasn’t so unusual for them to have to flee from a village in the night so that the disgruntled locals, who felt they’d been cheated after such a bad show, didn’t beat them up. Tickets were often used to barter for eggs, honey, corn, even vegetables—the important thing was for the troupe to eat. When they were lucky, though, they ate in a restaurant. They’d been able to do so today because the tour in Pieria had gone very well thanks to Martha, the woman who was observing Polyxeni so carefully. Lambros had to admit that her acting had saved the whole troupe. She’d been with them for two months, and things

Most companies tend to focus on short-term results and hence that makes them frequently do things that deviate away from their articulated strategy . . . these diversions take them away from the path they have to travel to achieve their long-term goals . . . the willingness to resist the temptation of short-term ‘off-strategy’ profits for long-term sustainable gain is not there in most Indian companies,’ writes Rama Bijapurkar, a leading market strategy consultant and independent director (2015).

When she finally grew still, a taut silence settled over them. From the corner of his eye he could see her worrying her lip, her small white teeth sinking into the soft pink flesh. Remembering how those lips felt beneath his, another surge of longing knotted his guts, making him recall the plans he had made for the evening--plans that were now drifting away on the wind. He wanted her, yes, but not if it meant forcing her. “I suppose that…” Her voice trailed off. She plucked nervously at her skirt, then ran her fingertips up the line of buttons on her bodice. She glanced around nervously, still nibbling her lip. “I, um, haven’t forgotten my promises to you.” “This is good.” Hunter watched her with gentle amusement. “A promise is a promise, even when given under unusual circumstances. You kept up your part, and--” She seemed unable to meet his gaze. “I’m sure you expect me to keep up mine.” A dark flush crept up her neck. “I, um, guess you had Amy taken to your mother’s so we could--so we could…” She looked so distressed that Hunter took pity on her. “Ah, yes, we have a bargain, do we not?” He forced a long and very loud yawn. “My heart is heavy to say these words, Blue Eyes, but I am sure enough weary after traveling so far, eh?” Her expression brightened so visibly that he nearly chuckled. “Oh, but of course!” she exclaimed in a shaky little voice. “You’ve ridden a very long way. You must be exhausted.” He yawned again and patted the fur beside him. “You will lie beside me.” “But what about Amy?” “Your Aye-mee is with my mother, yes? The woman who is mean like a buffalo. She is safe. You will be easy about her until the sun shows its face.” His voice turned husky. “Keemah, come.

At about this time David hit on a scheme to end their financial problems. With his growing family, their limited income must have been the cause of constant worry to him. Stories of the rich strikes in the Klondike a decade earlier, perhaps bolstered by his spell of active service in South Africa, seem to have persuaded him that gold-mining might be the answer. On hearing that a new goldfield had been discovered in Ontario, he staked several claims to forty acres near the small township of Swastika, in the Great Lakes area. Only small quantities of gold had been found there so far, but a big seam was believed to exist. ---- Over the next twenty years or so, David would travel to Ontario many times to work the claim. He had already been there alone when, in the spring of 1912, he and Sydney decided to go together and – the biggest treat — they were to sail on the maiden voyage of the Titanic. Fortunately, something happened to make this impossible, and their departure was delayed until autumn of the following year. ---- It is not difficult to see why David remained keen, although the mining project eventually came to nothing. Furthermore, he and Sydney were at their closest in the shack at Swastika through the winter in that inhospitable climate, and it was one of the happiest times of David’s life. It was there that Sydney conceived their fifth child. ---- The parents, still hoping for a second boy, were disappointed, but soon came round. There was time for another boy. In David’s absence Sydney called her Unity after an actress (Unity Moore) she admired, and then Grandfather Redesdale said that she must have a topically apposite second name so they added Valkyrie, after Wagner’s Norse war-maidens. Almost from the time of her birth she was known in family circles as ‘Bobo’, but with hindsight, Unity Valkyrie’s unusual name, combined with the place of her conception, Swastika, seems almost like an eerie prophecy which the fifth Mitford child had no alternative but to fulfil.

This beautiful mystery woman had a very white complexion and wore her blond, silky hair tied back from her face in a braid, which she had tucked under her fur coat. As she got closer, I could see that her facial features were not detailed in the way of an earthly human face. She had beautiful, small eyes and a very small nose with a tip that somehow looked unfinished. It was the same with her tiny mouth, something about the corners looked unfinished as well. I was frozen and I did not know what to do. Honestly, my mind stopped functioning and seemed to travel far away, wandering over my head in search of an explanation or an answer for this apparition. And then this beautiful mystery woman arrived in front of me and inexplicably hugged me very tight, with unusual passion for a stranger. With what felt like the deepest, genuine love, the beautiful mystery woman placed her forehead very tightly against the right side of my neck and then she raised her head until her warm right cheek was tight against my right cheek, so tight I could feel the bones of her face. Her left arm held me tight around my waist, while her right arm was over my left shoulder, squeezing me from behind my neck. She did not say ‘hi’ or any word; she just kept holding me tight that I started to feel her body heat.

In his first class of the day, correlated language arts, a class for students at least two years below their grade level in English, Boobie Miles spent the period working on a short research paper that he called “The Wonderful Life of Zebras.” He thumbed through various basic encyclopedia entries on the zebra. He ogled at how fast they ran (“Damn, they travel thirty miles”) and was so captivated by a picture of a zebra giving birth that he showed it to a classmate (“Want to see it have a baby, man?”). By the end of the class, Boobie produced the following thesis paragraph: Zebras are one of the most unusual animals in the world today. The zebra has many different kind in it nature. The habitat of the zebra is in wide open plain. Many zebras have viris types of relatives. He then went on to algebra I, a course that the average college-bound student took in ninth grade and some took in eighth. Because of his status as a special needs student, Boobie hadn’t taken the course until his senior year. He was having difficulty with it and his average midway through the fall was 71. After lunch it was on to creative writing, where Boobie spent a few minutes playing with a purple plastic gargoyle-looking monster. He lifted the fingers of the monster so it could pick its nose, then stuck his own fingers into its mouth. There were five minutes of instruction that day; students spent the remaining fifty-odd minutes working on various stories they were writing. They pretty much could do what they wanted. Boobie wrote a little and also explained to two blond-haired girls what some rap terms meant, that “chillin’ to the strength,” for example, meant “like cool to the max.” Boobie enjoyed this class. It gave him an unfettered opportunity to express himself, and the teacher didn’t expect much from him. His whole purpose in life, she felt, was to be a football player. “That’s the only thing kids like that have going for them, is that physical strength,” she said.

A car travelled between London and Manchester fuelled only by coffee. It was called the Car-puccino

You feel like you’re in a high-end furniture store, or even a spa, for that matter. Just very stately, appointed, everything is very intentional,” says forty-four-year-old Scott Pope. Pope is the CEO of ROAMD, a network of nearly one hundred membership-based concierge medical practices. He’s a pharmacist by training, and a concierge patient in Charlotte, North Carolina, where he lives. Joining ROAMD lets concierge doctors extend their wealthy clients the same level of attention while traveling that they enjoy at home. For annual fees typically ranging from $2,000 to $10,000 per head—some docs charge up to $40,000—a person can expect highly individualized, proactive, and unusually private primary care.

United Airlines Contact Number-+1-855-653-0624 United Airlines Contact Number Before calling United Airlines customer service, make sure that you are calling the correct number for addressing your concern. United has different phone numbers for its departments, including reservations, accessibility, and Mileage Plus. In addition, United has separate phone lines for different countries. Travelers should be aware of the United phone number for the country that they are currently in. Most United Airlines customer service phone lines are open all the time, but some have more restricted hours. For example, there are dedicated phone lines for non-English speakers, and their business hours are limited. Ensure that you are calling at the right time, adjusting for time zone differences, to avoid frustration. As one might expect, there is a range of reports about United's phone-based customer service. Some people claim that they are able to receive quick and courteous resolutions to their issues while others feel that United Airlines representatives are non-receptive to legitimate customer concerns. There are several media reports of individuals having to involve third parties, such as consumer advocates and journalists, before their case is resolved. There have been some mentions of United customer service in the news media, though it should be noted that the more egregious cases have involved unusual situations, such as a glitch in United's boarding system that resulted in a passenger being labeled a "no-show," resulting in a canceled return ticket. In that case, third-party advocates had to get involved as it appeared that United's customer service representatives were not equipped to handle such a situation. Another unusual case involved code sharing between United and another airline, resulting in gaps in travel plans that were not easily remedied.

In 1920, Mary McLeod Bethune, an American educator, stateswoman, philanthropist, humanitarian, womanist, and civil-rights activist traveled through her home state of Florida to encourage women to vote, facing tremendous obstacles at every step along the route. The night before Election Day in November 1920, white-robed Klansmen marched into Bethune’s girls’ school to intimidate the women who had gathered there to get ready to vote, aiming to prevent them from voting even though they had managed to get their names on the voter rolls. Newspapers in Wilmington, Delaware, reported that the numbers of Black women who wanted to register to vote were “unusually large,” but they were turned away for their alleged failure to “comply with Constitutional tests” without any specification of what these tests were. The Birmingham Black newspaper Voice of the People noted that only half a dozen Black women had been registered to vote because the state had applied the same restrictive rules for voting to colored women that they applied to colored men.

What is an unusual habit or an absurd thing that you love? The really ridiculous thing, which I find totally life-changing is, at little pauses in our life, or when we need rejuvenation, I call [my wife] Elaine, and we sit or stand, and revisit a moment in our past by watching a music video on YouTube. It’s an extraordinary thing. If Proust had had YouTube, he wouldn’t have had to write À la recherche du temps perdu, because thanks to it, none of our past is ever lost. We can revisit it any time we like. There is our Back to the Future, there is our little piece of personal time travel, back to a time and a place earlier in our life that is rich in emotion, and it’s magically easy to do, and it takes almost no time at all.

One unusual fringe benefit of time travel is the ability to visit your own grave. Personally I find the practice a tad morbid, but I do get some satisfaction from the fact that the disproportionate dates on my tombstones have confounded many a passerby.” -Excerpt from the journal of Harold Quickly, 1897   “Get

When Warren was a little boy fingerprinting nuns and collecting bottle caps, he had no knowledge of what he would someday become. Yet as he rode his bike through Spring Valley, flinging papers day after day, and raced through the halls of The Westchester, pulse pounding, trying to make his deliveries on time, if you had asked him if he wanted to be the richest man on earth—with his whole heart, he would have said, Yes. That passion had led him to study a universe of thousands of stocks. It made him burrow into libraries and basements for records nobody else troubled to get. He sat up nights studying hundreds of thousands of numbers that would glaze anyone else’s eyes. He read every word of several newspapers each morning and sucked down the Wall Street Journal like his morning Pepsi, then Coke. He dropped in on companies, spending hours talking about barrels with the woman who ran an outpost of Greif Bros. Cooperage or auto insurance with Lorimer Davidson. He read magazines like the Progressive Grocer to learn how to stock a meat department. He stuffed the backseat of his car with Moody’s Manuals and ledgers on his honeymoon. He spent months reading old newspapers dating back a century to learn the cycles of business, the history of Wall Street, the history of capitalism, the history of the modern corporation. He followed the world of politics intensely and recognized how it affected business. He analyzed economic statistics until he had a deep understanding of what they signified. Since childhood, he had read every biography he could find of people he admired, looking for the lessons he could learn from their lives. He attached himself to everyone who could help him and coattailed anyone he could find who was smart. He ruled out paying attention to almost anything but business—art, literature, science, travel, architecture—so that he could focus on his passion. He defined a circle of competence to avoid making mistakes. To limit risk he never used any significant amount of debt. He never stopped thinking about business: what made a good business, what made a bad business, how they competed, what made customers loyal to one versus another. He had an unusual way of turning problems around in his head, which gave him insights nobody else had. He developed a network of people who—for the sake of his friendship as well as his sagacity—not only helped him but also stayed out of his way when he wanted them to. In hard times or easy, he never stopped thinking about ways to make money. And all of this energy and intensity became the motor that powered his innate intelligence, temperament, and skills.

I am saying, however, that to be as marginal and as undomesticated as someone who is in real exile is for an intellectual to be unusually responsive to the traveler rather than to the potentate, to the provisional and risky rather than to the habitual, to innovation and experiment rather than the authoritatively given status quo. The exilic intellectual does not respond to the logic of the conventional but to the audacity of daring, and to representing change, to moving on, not standing still.

I remember reading that pirates pulled off a massive heist here in the mid 1800s. It’s quite a story actually, but to summarise, a travelling circus had come to town, and its excited inhabitants flocked to see the show, every last one of them, including the town’s coastguards. Taking advantage of the coast being unusually clear, pirates swooped down on a vessel stuffed to the gunwales with tobacco. They used barges to sail the contraband up the Adur to the village of Beeding, where the booty was soon sold and spirited away. Such was the fury of the King’s Revenue men, all of Shoreham’s coastguards lost their jobs.

There is so much comfort in staying with the crowd - following their dictates and falling in line with their creed. You are accepted by the group. You are safe. But the moment you step out of the group's boundary, you are on your own. Alone, without a 'valuable' support, you take your first faltering steps away from your comfort zone, into the unusual road to your destinies and relevance. It's a lonely road, filled with uncertainties and discomfort. But it is the only road there is that leads to true happiness and a life of impact. Only an inner strength can keep you passionate and enthusiastic on this road less travelled by men. Only a staying power beyond the ordinary can keep your eyes on the prize.

An unusually large, rare, golden wolf trotted out of the timberline, circled the area warily, and sat down on its haunches only feet from Jacques. It watched him steadily with its strange golden eyes, completely unafraid. It seemed not to be affected by the fire, the lightning, or the Carpathian male. Jacques watched the animal equally intently, certain he was facing more than a wolf. The creature did not make an attempt to use the common mental path to communicate. It simply watched him, taking in the bizarre scene, the golden eyes never wavering. A humorless smile curved Jacques’ hard mouth. “If you are looking for action tonight, I am too tired to oblige you, and far too hungry.” The wolf’s shape contorted, stretched, shimmered in the smoke of the fire, and soon a large, heavily muscled man was facing Jacques. His long, shaggy mane of hair was blond, his eyes golden, his body perfectly balanced. “You are Jacques, brother to Mikhail. I heard you were dead.” “That is the story going around,” Jacques assented warily. “You have no memory of me? I am Julian, brother to Aidan. I have been away these last long years. The far-off mountains, the places without people, are my home.” “The last I heard, you were fighting wars in distant lands.” “When the mood is upon me, I fight where it is needed,” Julian agreed. “I see you do also. The vampire lies dead, and you are pale beyond imagination.” Jacques’ smile was grim. “Do not allow my color to fool you.” “I am no vampire yet, and if ever I fear turning, I will go to Aidan, and he will destroy me if I cannot do so myself. If you wish to take blood, then I offer it freely. The healer knows me; you can ask him if I am a reliable resource.” There was the slightest of smiles, a self-mocking humor. “What are you doing in these parts?” Jacques asked suspiciously. “I was traveling through, on my back to the United States, when I heard the butchers were back, and I thought I would make myself useful to our people for a change.

Psychoanalysis: An Elegy" What are you thinking? I think that I would like to write a poem that is slow as a summer As slow getting started As 4th of July somewhere around the middle of the second stanza After a lot of unusual rain California seems long in the summer. I would like to write a poem as long as California And as slow as a summer. Do you get me, Doctor? It would have to be as slow As the very tip of summer. As slow as the summer seems On a hot day drinking beer outside Riverside Or standing in the middle of a white-hot road Between Bakersfield and Hell Waiting for Santa Claus. What are you thinking now? I’m thinking that she is very much like California. When she is still her dress is like a roadmap. Highways Traveling up and down her skin Long empty highways With the moon chasing jackrabbits across them On hot summer nights. I am thinking that her body could be California And I a rich Eastern tourist Lost somewhere between Hell and Texas Looking at a map of a long, wet, dancing California That I have never seen. Send me some penny picture-postcards, lady, Send them. One of each breast photographed looking Like curious national monuments, One of your body sweeping like a three-lane highway Twenty-seven miles from a night’s lodging In the world’s oldest hotel. What are you thinking? I am thinking of how many times this poem Will be repeated. How many summers Will torture California Until the damned maps burn Until the mad cartographer Falls to the ground and possesses The sweet thick earth from which he has been hiding. What are you thinking now? I am thinking that a poem could go on forever.