Water Drilling Quotes

You smell good, too,” said Patch It’s called a shower.” I was staring straight ahead. When he didn’t answer, I turned sideways. “Soap. Shampoo. Hot water.” Naked. I know the drill.

Since we're keeping it primal, you smell good," he observed. "It's called a shower...," I began automatically, then trailed off. My memory snagged, taken aback by a compelling and forceful sense of undue familiarity. "Soap, shampoo, hot water," I added, almost as an afterthought. "Naked. I know the drill," Jev said, something unreadeble passing over his eyes.

Take the case of courage. No quality has ever so much addled the brains and tangled the definitions of merely rational sages. Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die. 'He that will lose his life, the same shall save it,' is not a piece of mysticism for saints and heroes. It is a piece of everyday advice for sailors or mountaineers. It might be printed in an Alpine guide or a drill book. This paradox is the whole principle of courage; even of quite earthly or brutal courage. A man cut off by the sea may save his life if we will risk it on the precipice. He can only get away from death by continually stepping within an inch of it. A soldier surrounded by enemies, if he is to cut his way out, needs to combine a strong desire for living with a strange carelessness about dying. He must not merely cling to life, for then he will be a coward, and will not escape. He must not merely wait for death, for then he will be a suicide, and will not escape. He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it; he must desire life like water and yet drink death like wine. No philosopher, I fancy, has ever expressed this romantic riddle with adequate lucidity, and I certainly have not done so. But Christianity has done more: it has marked the limits of it in the awful graves of the suicide and the hero, showing the distance between him who dies for the sake of living and him who dies for the sake of dying.

You smell good." "It's called a shower. Soap, shampoo, water-" "Naked. I know the drill.

His mouth twisted into a perceptive, sexy smile. "Hmm." "Hmm?" I looked away, flustered, automatically using irritation to cover my discomfort up. "What does 'hmm' have to do with anything? Could you ever use more than five words? All this grunting and miced words make you come across--primal." His smile tipped higher. "Primal." "You're impossible." "Me Jev, you Nora." "Stop it." But I nearly smiled in spite of myself. "Since we're keeping it primal, you smell good," he observed. Hw moved closer, makin me acutely aware of his size, the rise and fall of his chest, the warm burn of his skin on mine. Electricity tingled along my scalp, and I shuddered with pleasure. "It's called a shower...," I began automatically, then trailed off. My memory snagged, taken aback by a compelling and forceful sense of undue familiarity. "Soap, shampoo, hot water," I added, almost as an afterthought. "Naked. I know the drill," Jev said, something unreadable passing over his eyes. Unsure how to proceed, I attempted to wash away the moment with an airy laugh. "Are you flirting with me, Jev?" "Does it feel that way to you?" "I don't know you well enough to say either way." I tried to keep my voice level, neutral even. "Then we'll have to change that." Still uncertain of his motives, I cleared my throat. Two could play this game. "Running from bad guys together is your idea of playing getting-to-know-you?" "No. This is." He dipped my body backward, drawing me up in a slow arc until he raised me flush against him. In his arms, my joints loosened, my defenses melting as he led me through the sultry steps.

You smell good, too,” said Patch "It’s called a shower.” I was staring straight ahead. When he didn’t answer, I turned sideways. “Soap. Shampoo. Hot water.” "Naked. I know the drill.

The bag sprang a leak. The leak had to be patched. The patch sprang a leak. The crew patched the patch. Then the bag sprang another leak. The drilling could not go on.

They patched the bag again. The drilling went on.

I heard that when white folks go fishin they do somethin called 'catch and release.' Catch and release? I nodded solemnly, suddenly nervous and curious at the same time. 'That really bothers me', Denver went on. 'I just can't figure it out. 'Cause when colored folks go fishin, we really proud of what we catch, and we take it and show it off to everybody that'll look. Then we eat what we catch...in other words, we use it to SUSTAIN us. So it really bothers me that white folks would go to all the trouble to catch a fish, when when they done caught it, just throw it back in the water.' He paused again, and the silence between us stretched a full minute. Then: 'Did you hear what I said?' I nodded, afraid to speak, afraid to offend. Denver looked away, searching the blue autumn sky, then locked onto me again with that drill-bit start. 'So, Mr. Ron, it occurred to me: If you is fishin for a friend you just gon' catch and release, then I ain't got no desire to be your friend.' I returned Denver's gaze with what I hoped was a receptive expression and hung on. Suddenly his eyes gentled and he spoke more softly than before: 'But if you is lookin for a REAL friend, then I'll be one. Forever.

According to legend, Father Earth did not originally hate life. In fact, as the lorists tell it, once upon a time Earth did everything he could to facilitate the strange emergence of life on his surface. He crafted even, predictable seasons; kept changes of wind and wave and temperature slow enough that every living being could adapt, evolve; summoned waters that purified themselves, skies that always cleared after a storm. He did not create life—that was happenstance—but he was pleased and fascinated by it, and proud to nurture such strange wild beauty upon his surface. Then people began to do horrible things to Father Earth. They poisoned waters beyond even his ability to cleanse, and killed much of the other life that lived on his surface. They drilled through the crust of his skin, past the blood of his mantle, to get at the sweet marrow of his bones. And at the height of human hubris and might, it was the orogenes who did something that even Earth could not forgive: They destroyed his only child.

It was the Indian manner to vanish into the landscape, not to stand out against it. The Hopi villages that were set upon rock mesas were made to look like the rock on which they sat, were imperceptible at a distance. ... In the working of silver or drilling of turquoise the Indians had exhaustless patience; upon their blankets and belts and ceremonial robes they lavished their skill and pains. But their conception of decoration did not extend to the landscape. They seemed to have none of the European's desire to "master" nature, to arrange and re-create. They spent their ingenuity in the other direction; in accommodating themselves to the scene in which they found themselves. This was not so much from indolence, the Bishop thought, as from an inherited caution and respect. It was as if the great country were asleep, and they wished to carry on their lives without awakening it; or as if the spirits of earth and air and water were things not to antagonize and arouse. When they hunted, it was with the same discretion; an Indian hunt was never a slaughter. They ravaged neither the rivers nor the forest, and if they irrigated, they took as little water as would serve their needs. The land and all that it bore they treated with consideration; not attempting to improve it, they never desecrated it.

Shortly after this exchange my roommate suggested we start throwing water balloons at the construction workers. Not really at them because, I know, I know, it's not their fault. But believe me, it's hard to look down and see a man with a seven-speed power drill plowing through a brick wall and tell yourself he's not responsible for the noise.

Trying to make everyone happy is equally illusionary as drilling holes in the water.

But what my car needs is gas, not memories! How can you make a car go on memories?' B.D. scratched under her Admiral's hat. 'What'd you think gas was, girl? 'Course there's all sorts of fuel, wind and wishes and chocolate cake and collard greens and water and brawn, but you're wanting the kind that burns in an engine. That kind of gas is nothing more than the past stored up and fermented and kept down in the cellar of the earth till it's wanted. Gas is saved-up sunlight. Giant ferns and apples of immortality and dimetrodons and cyclopses and werewhales drank up the sun as it shone on their backs a million years ago and used it to be a bigger fern or make more werewhales or drop seeds of improbability.' Her otter's paws moved quick and sure, selecting a squat, square bottle here and a round rosy one there. 'It so happens sunshine has a fearful memory. It sticks around even after its favorite dimetrodon dies. Gets hard and wily. Turns into something you can touch, something you can drill, something you can pour. But it still remembers having one eye and slapping the ocean's face with a great heavy tail. It liked making more dinosaurs and growing a frond as tall as a bank. It likes to make things alive, to make things go.

Accordingly, he had the two leaders beheaded, and straightway installed the pair next in order as leaders in their place. When this had been done, the drum was sounded for the drill once more; and the girls went through all the evolutions, turning to the right or to the left, marching ahead or wheeling back, kneeling or standing, with perfect accuracy and precision, not venturing to utter a sound. Then Sun Tzu sent a messenger to the King saying: “Your soldiers, Sire, are now properly drilled and disciplined, and ready for your majesty's inspection. They can be put to any use that their sovereign may desire; bid them go through fire and water, and they will not disobey.

The sound of diesel fuel rushing through grimy pistons and cylinders below a morning-fogged window bored through his ears like a deep-water drill bit, and the thump of his own heartbeat cursed him for breaking one of his many rules.

persistent, flowing through fallen shadows, excavating tunnels, drilling silences, insisting, running under my pillow, brushing past my temples, covering my eyelids with another, intangible skin made of air, its wandering nations, its drowsy tribes migrate through the provinces of my body, it crosses, re-crosses under the bridges of my bones, slips into my left ear, spills out from my right, climbs the nape of my neck, turns and turns in my skull, wanders across the terrace of my forehead, conjures visions, scatters them, erases my thoughts one by one with hands of unwetting water, it evaporates them, black surge, tide of pulse-beats, murmur of water groping forward repeating the same meaningless syllable, I hear its sleepwalking delirium losing itself in serpentine galleries of echoes, it comes back, drifts off, comes back, endlessly flings itself off the edges of my cliffs, and I don’t stop falling and I fall

For a person's nature,like a rock,can be drilled into by drops of water.For a person's nature,like a rock,can be drilled into by drops of water.For a person's nature,like a rock,can be drilled into by drops of water.For a person's nature,like a rock,can be drilled into by drops of water.

Then the long nights, that were also days, in the hospital. And the long blanks, that were also nights. Needles, and angled glass rods to suck water through. Needles, and curious enamel wedges slid under your middle. Needles, and - needles and needles and needles. Like swarms of persistent mosquitoes with unbreakable drills. The way a pincushion feels, if it could feel. Or the target of a porcupine. Or a case of not just momentary but permanently endured static electricity after you scuff across a woolen rug and then put your finger on a light switch. Even food was a needle - a jab into a vein... ("For The Rest Of Her Life")

Remember my experiments with the RTG and having a hot bath? Same principle, but I came up with an improvement: submerge the RTG. No heat will be wasted that way. I started with a large rigid sample container (or “plastic box” to people who don’t work at NASA). I ran a tube through the open top and down the inside wall. Then I coiled it in the bottom to make a spiral. I glued it in place like that and sealed the end. Using my smallest drill bit, I put dozens of little holes in the coil. The idea is for the freezing return air from the regulator to pass through the water as a bunch of little bubbles. The increased surface area will get the heat into the air better. Then I got a medium flexible sample container (“Ziploc bag”) and tried to seal the RTG in it. But the RTG has an irregular shape, and I couldn’t get all the air out of the bag. I can’t allow any air in there.

You smell good too,” said Patch. “It’s called a shower.” I was staring straight ahead. When he didn’t answer, I turned sideways. “Soap. Shampoo. Hot water.” “Naked. I know the drill.

Drilling from a ship in open water is, in the words of one oceanographer, "like trying to drill a hole in the sidewalks of New York from atop the Empire State Building using a strand of spaghetti".

Those who come with wheat, millet, corn or milk, they are not helping us. Those who really want to help us can give us ploughs, tractors, fertilizers, insecticides, watering cans, drills and dams. That is how we would define food aid.

Keep your head down, speak only when spoken to. A warning drilled into him every day of his life growing up in Nigton, Texas, née Nig Town, née Nigger Town (its true birth name when it sprang up a hundred years ago in the piney woods of East Texas).

Instead of drilling down and finding ways to creatively meet the target cost as Ford did, if companies give in to the tempting route of either bumping up the strategic price or cutting back on utility, they are not on the path to lucrative blue waters.

THE BEET IS THE MOST INTENSE of vegetables. The radish, admittedly, is more feverish, but the fire of the radish is a cold fire, the fire of discontent not of passion. Tomatoes are lusty enough, yet there runs through tomatoes an undercurrent of frivolity. Beets are deadly serious. Slavic peoples get their physical characteristics from potatoes, their smoldering inquietude from radishes, their seriousness from beets. The beet is the melancholy vegetable, the one most willing to suffer. You can't squeeze blood out of a turnip . . . The beet is the murderer returned to the scene of the crime. The beet is what happens when the cherry finishes with the carrot. The beet is the ancient ancestor of the autumn moon, bearded, buried, all but fossilized; the dark green sails of the grounded moon-boat stitched with veins of primordial plasma; the kite string that once connected the moon to the Earth now a muddy whisker drilling desperately for rubies. The beet was Rasputin's favorite vegetable. You could see it in his eyes. In Europe there is grown widely a large beet they call the mangel-wurzel. Perhaps it is mangel-wurzel that we see in Rasputin. Certainly there is mangel-wurzel in the music of Wagner, although it is another composer whose name begins, B-e-e-t——. Of course, there are white beets, beets that ooze sugar water instead of blood, but it is the red beet with which we are concerned; the variety that blushes and swells like a hemorrhoid, a hemorrhoid for which there is no cure. (Actually, there is one remedy: commission a potter to make you a ceramic asshole—and when you aren't sitting on it, you can use it as a bowl for borscht.) An old Ukrainian proverb warns, “A tale that begins with a beet will end with the devil.” That is a risk we have to take.

Let me tell you,” the nun went on, “everyone is equal under God! Prejudice is nothing but ignorance, jealousy, pettiness”—she shook the hose with each word, sending undulating arcs of water into the flower beds—“and intolerance is responsible for all the violence! It’s drilled into children from the beginning.

Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die. "He that will lose his life, the same shall save it," is not a piece of mysticism for saints and heroes. It is a piece of everyday advice for sailors or mountaineers. It might be printed in an Alpine guide or a drill book. This paradox is the whole principle of courage; even of quite earthly or quite brutal courage. A man cut off by the sea may save his life if he will risk it on the precipice. He can only get away from death by continually stepping within an inch of it. A soldier surrounded by enemies, if he is to cut his way out, needs to combine a strong desire for living with a strange carelessness about dying. He must not merely cling to life, for then he will be a coward, and will not escape. He must not merely wait for death, for then he will be a suicide, and will not escape. He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it; he must desire life like water and yet drink death like wine.

His own eyes prickle wetly. His blond hair darkens with sweat; pearls of water stand out on his smooth six-year-old forehead. The longer he stares back, the wider the gaze seems to get, like a grin. Her eyes radiate hard spines of heat, which drill into him. Timmy Babson feels punctured, “seen.” “Jane!” Timmy screams for his mother, calling for her by her first name for the first time. “Jane, Jane! It’s looking

contrary to previous assumptions, young men and women who possess the collective social graces of a herd of sex-crazed water buffalo and have an intelligence quotient in the range of Forrest Gump on three hits of acid, can be taught to sound like Wall Street wizards, as long as you write every last word down for them and then keep drilling it into their heads again and again—every day, twice a day—for a year straight.

But when the time comes to judge, to un­der­stand a be­trayal which will spread like fame across the Web, which will end worlds, I ask you not to think of me—my name was not even writ on wa­ter as your lost poet’s soul said—but to think of Old Earth dy­ing for no rea­son, to think of the dol­phins, their gray flesh dry­ing and rot­ting in the sun, to see—as I have seen—the motile isles with no place to wan­der, their feed­ing grounds de­stroyed, the Equa­to­r­ial Shal­lows scabbed with drilling plat­forms, the is­lands them­selves bur­dened with shout­ing, tram­mel­ing tourists smelling of UV lo­tion and cannabis. Or bet­ter yet, think of none of that. Stand as I did af­ter throw­ing the switch, a mur­derer, a be­trayer, but still proud, feet firmly planted on Hy­pe­r­ion’s shift­ing sand, head held high, fist raised against the sky, cry­ing “A plague on both your houses!

Nothing can drive out the disease: not praying, not bathing them in holy water, not tying them to their beds, not leaping out from the night to frighten them, not holding them by the ankle in the cold river, not beating them around the head with a yew branch, not burying them crown to toe in warm manure, not hanging them upside down from a high tree and spinning them until they vomit, not drilling a tiny hole through their skulls to let the bad humors out of the brains.

But when the time comes to judge, to understand a betrayal which will spread like flame across the Web, which will end worlds, I ask you not to think of me—my name was not even writ on water as your lost poet’s soul said—but to think of Old Earth dying for no reason, to think of the dolphins, their gray flesh drying and rotting in the sun, to see—as I have seen—the motile isles with no place to wander, their feeding grounds destroyed, the Equatorial Shallows scabbed with drilling platforms, the islands themselves burdened with shouting, trammeling tourists smelling of UV lotion and cannabis. Or better yet, think of none of that. Stand as I did after throwing the switch, a murderer, a betrayer, but still proud, feet firmly planted on Hyperion’s shifting sand, head held high, fist raised against the sky, crying “A plague on both your houses!” For you see, I remember my grandmother’s dream. I remember the way it could have been. I remember Siri.

Happily, there is an effective method to get to the heart of any problem called The Five Whys. You identify a problem and then drill down into The Five Whys behind it. I’ll give you are very simplistic example to illustrate how this works. Problem: My tea was cold. Why #1 The kettle didn’t heat the water. Why #2 There was no power. Why #3 The fuse in the plug was blown. Why #4 An incorrect fuse was being used. Why #5 The required fuse was not specified. Solution: We need to get the right fuse to use in the future.

You’ve been barely eating lately.” Mom said, trying to sound ‘motherly’. “And we’re becoming increasingly concerned.” “She’s right,” Dad added. “You barely eat anything, well except for salad and water and maybe a piece of actual food here and there.” It was bullshit! Complete and utter bullshit. If I had a problem, which I don’t, it was because of her! I inhaled a deep breath, feeling angry. “And whose fault is that. You’ve been drilling my head for the last few months” I snipped. “This is what you wanted.” I eyed Mom, feeling my eyes water. “All Summer, you harassed me, pried into my personal space, made me keep a food diary. I’m doing what you want.” Her jaw dropped. “This wasn’t what I wanted.” Mom shook her head. “I didn’t want you to starve yourself and just eat salad.” “You didn’t?” I practically yelled. I took a breath and let it out. “Last Summer…...EVERY SINGLE TIME YOU found out that I didn’t eat anything from your precious food manual you practically threw a fit.” Mom shook her head, eyeing Dad like she was being falsely accused. “It wasn’t like that.” She stammered. “It was.” I snapped. “It was like that every day.

Water began to drip steadily through the dormer window. Outside, in the treacherous city, a thaw had come, giving the streets the unreliable consistency of wet cardboard. Slow masses of whiteness slid from sloping, grey-slate roofs. The footprints of delivery vans corrugated the slush. First light; and the dawn chorus began, chattering of road-drills, chirrup of burglar alarms, trumpeting of wheeled creatures clashing at corners, the deep whirr of a large olive-green garbage eater, screaming radio-voices from a wooden painter's cradle clinging to the upper storey of a Free House, roar of the great wakening juggernauts rushing awesomely down this long but narrow pathway. From beneath the earth came tremors denoting the passage of huge subterranean worms that devoured and regurgitated human beings, and from the skies the thrum of choppers and the screech of higher, gleaming birds.

I have again been asked to explain how one can "become a Daoists..." with all of the sad things happening in our world today, Laozi and Zhuangzi give words of advice, tho not necessarily to become a Daoist priest or priestess... " So many foreigners who want to become “Religious Daoists” 道教的道师 （道士） do not realize that they must not only receive a transmission of a Lu 籙 register which identifies their Daoist school, and learn as well how to sing the ritual melodies, play the flute, stringed instruments, drums, and sacred dance steps, required to be an ordained and functioning Daoist priest or priestess. This process usually takes 10 years or more of daily discipleship and practice, to accomplish. There are 86 schools and genre of Daoist rituals listed in the Baiyun Guan Gazeteer, 白雲觀志, which was edited by Oyanagi Sensei, in Tokyo, 1928, and again in 1934, and re-published by Baiyun Guan in Beijing, available in their book shop to purchase. Some of the schools, such as the Quanzhen Longmen 全真龙门orders, allow their rituals and Lu registers to be learned by a number of worthy disciples or monks; others, such as the Zhengyi, Qingwei, Pole Star, and Shangqing 正一，清微，北极，上请 registers may only be taught in their fullness to one son and/or one disciple, each generation. Each of the schools also have an identifying poem, from 20 or 40 character in length, or in the case of monastic orders (who pass on the registers to many disciples), longer poems up to 100 characters, which identify the generation of transmission from master to disciple. The Daoist who receives a Lu register (給籙元科, pronounced "Ji Lu Yuanke"), must use the character from the poem given to him by his or her master, when composing biao 表 memorials, shuwen 梳文 rescripts, and other documents, sent to the spirits of the 3 realms (heaven, earth, water /underworld). The rituals and documents are ineffective unless the correct characters and talismanic signature are used. The registers are not given to those who simply practice martial artists, Chinese medicine, and especially never shown to scholars. The punishment for revealing them to the unworthy is quite severe, for those who take payment for Lu transmission, or teaching how to perform the Jinlu Jiao and Huanglu Zhai 金籙醮，黃籙齋 科儀 keyi rituals, music, drum, sacred dance steps. Tang dynasty Tangwen 唐文 pronunciation must also be used when addressing the highest Daoist spirits, i.e., the 3 Pure Ones and 5 Emperors 三请五帝. In order to learn the rituals and receive a Lu transmission, it requires at least 10 years of daily practice with a master, by taking part in the Jiao and Zhai rituals, as an acolyte, cantor, or procession leader. Note that a proper use of Daoist ritual also includes learning Inner Alchemy, ie inner contemplative Daoist meditation, the visualization of spirits, where to implant them in the body, and how to summon them forth during ritual. The woman Daoist master Wei Huacun’s Huangting Neijing, 黃庭內經 to learn the esoteric names of the internalized Daoist spirits. Readers must be warned never to go to Longhu Shan, where a huge sum is charged to foreigners ($5000 to $9000) to receive a falsified document, called a "license" to be a Daoist! The first steps to true Daoist practice, Daoist Master Zhuang insisted to his disciples, is to read and follow the Laozi Daode Jing and the Zhuangzi Neipian, on a daily basis. Laozi Ch 66, "the ocean is the greatest of all creatures because it is the lowest", and Ch 67, "my 3 most precious things: compassion for all, frugal living for myself, respect all others and never put anyone down" are the basis for all Daoist practice. The words of Zhuangzi, Ch 7, are also deeply meaningful: "Yin and Yang were 2 little children who loved to play inside Hundun (ie Taiji, gestating Dao). They felt sorry because Hundun did not have eyes, or eats, or other senses. So everyday they drilled one hole, ie 2 eyes, 2 ears, 2 nostrils, one mouth; and on the 7th day, Hundun died.

I heard a right-wing radio show host two weeks ago talking about how the battle against environmentalists is winnable. He was saying the right wing had almost won the war. I heard this WHILE I was driving in Ohio on a main highway that was six inches above the flood waters. I can't imagine your average Ohio Republican voter is standing up to his waist in his flooded house thinking, “Goddamn straight! We've almost won the war against environmentalists! Time for a celebration!” talk about out fo touch with voters' concerns! You think they give a shit about whether there's a group oof people whoo think wind and solar power would help the world? No! Their number one concern is finding the front half of their house that rumor-has-it is a mile away on top of a Pizzeria Uno. Their main concern is not defending a billionaire's right to drill for oil in the last remaining polar bear's living room. Their main concern is finding something too weigh down their 2-year-old Corgi so he doesn't shoot off into the twister clouds like the last one did.

Beneath the bed of the river, below silts almost a storey thick, rested the remains of almost sixteen thousand citizens of Letheras. Their bones filled ancient wells that had been drilled before the river’s arrival – before the drainage course from the far eastern mountains changed cataclysmically, making the serpent lash its tail, the torrent carving a new channel, one that inundated a nascent city countless millennia ago. Letherii engineers centuries past had stumbled upon these submerged constructs, wondering at the humped corridors and the domed chambers, wondering at the huge, deep wells with their clear, cold water. And baffled to explain how such tunnels remained more or less dry, the cut channels seeming to absorb water like runners of sponge. No records existed any more recounting these discoveries – the tunnels and chambers and wells were lost knowledge to all but a chosen few. And of the existence of parallel passages, the hidden doors in the walls of corridors, and the hundreds of lesser tombs, not even those few were aware. Certain secrets belonged exclusively to the gods.

Incredibly, it transpired afterwards that no proper, full fire drill had ever been conducted at the plant. Even the procedure for fighting fire at Chernobyl was almost identical to any other industrial fire, with no regard for the possibility of radiation exposure - so presumptuous were senior figures that nothing could ever go wrong.153 By 6:35am, when all but the blaze within the reactor core were extinguished, 37 fire crews, comprising 186 firemen in 81 engines, had arrived to battle the flames.154 A few brave firefighters even ventured inside Unit 4’s reactor hall itself and poured water straight into the reactor. The radioactivity was so intense that they received a lethal dose in under a minute. As with most other efforts to cool the reactor over the following days, this only made the situation worse. They were pumping water into a nuclear inferno so hot that most water either split into a dangerous hydrogen/oxygen mix or instantly evaporated, while any remaining water flooded the basement. Many firemen fell ill in the process, and were rushed to hospital in Pripyat, though it was not well prepared to deal with radiation sickness. Doctors and nurses were also irradiated because the patients they treated were so contaminated that their own bodies had become radioactive.

role in this incredible event. In August 2010, news reports around the world began to tell the story of the plight of 33 miners trapped 2,300 feet below the earth in a Chilean mine. As the daily reports continued, the entire world watched what seemed to be a completely hopeless situation. Every effort to make contact with the men failed. The miners were running out of supplies and going to die. Incredibly — and to the surprise of the entire world — contact was made with the miners after 17 days! Engineers had been able to drill a small shaft down to precisely where the miners were imprisoned. Through this small shaft, food, water, and other supplies could be sent down to the trapped men. The ordeal was far from over, though. In order to save them, a much larger shaft had to be drilled, one that would allow them to be brought to the surface one by one. It would take a miracle for this to happen. From St. Peter’s in Rome, Pope Benedict XVI asked the entire world to pray for the miners. As a special sign of hope, the Pope personally blessed 33 rosaries and sent them to the miners so that they could pray the rosary and know that Jesus and Mary were with them. The blessed rosaries were sent down the small shaft to the men, and they began to pray them and wear them around their necks. Miraculously, after having been trapped for 69 days, all 33 men survived and were rescued from the mine. One by one, they emerged from the depths of the earth and saw sunshine again. What was the date of their rescue? It was October 13, the anniversary of the Miracle of the Sun at Fatima!

At one in the morning on the 20th. November, radio hams over most of Europe suffered serious interference to their reception, as if a new and exceptionally strong broadcaster was operating. They located the interference at two hundred and three metres; it sounded something like the noise of machinery or rushing water; then the continuous, unchanging noise was suddenly interrupted by a horrible, rasping noise (everyone described it in the same way: a hollow, nasal, almost synthetic sounding voice, made all the more so by the electronic apparatus); and this frog-like voice called excitedly, "Hello, hello, hello! Chief Salamander speaking. Hello, chief Salamander speaking. Stop all broadcasting, you men! Stop your broadcasting! Hello, Chief Salamander speaking!" And then another, strangely hollow voice asked: "Ready?" "Ready." There was a click as if the broadcast were being transferred to another speaker; and then another, unnaturally staccato voice called: "Attention! Attention! Attention!" "Hello!" "Now!" A voice was heard in the quiet of the night; it was rasping and tired-sounding but still had the air of authority. "Hello you people! This is Louisiana. This is Kiangsu. This is Senegambia. We regret the loss of human life. We have no wish to cause you unnecessary harm. We wish only that you evacuate those areas of coast which we will notify you of in advance. If you do as we say you will avoid anything regrettable. In future we will give you at least fourteen days notice of the places where we wish to extend our sea. Incidents so far have been no more than technical experiments. Your explosives have proved their worth. Thank you for them. "Hello you people! Remain calm. We wish you no harm. We merely need more water, more coastline, more shallows in which to live. There are too many of us. Your coastlines are already too limited for our needs. For this reason we need to demolish your continents. We will convert them into bays and islands. In this way, the length of coastline can be increased five-fold. We will construct new shallows. We cannot live in deep ocean. We will need your continents as materials to fill in the deep waters. We wish you no harm, but there are too many of us. You will be free to migrate inland. You will not be prevented from fleeing to the hills. The hills will be the last to be demolished. "We are here because you wanted us. You have distributed us over the entire world. Now you have us. We wish that you collaborate with us. You will provide us with steel for our picks and drills. you will provide us with explosives. You will provide us with torpedoes. You will work for us. Without you we will not be able to remove the old continents. Hello you people, Chief Salamander, in the name of all newts everywhere, offers collaboration with you. You will collaborate with us in the demolition of your world. Thank you." The tired, rasping voice became silent, and all that was heard was the constant noise resembling machinery or the sea. "Hello, hello, you people," the grating voice began again, "we will now entertain you with music from your gramophone records. Here, for your pleasure, is the March of the Tritons from the film, Poseidon.

On June 15, 1904, an annual gala was held on the passenger ship as it steamed up the East River, with about 1,400 people from St. Mark’s Evangelical Lutheran Church. Consisting mostly of German immigrants, the boat was packed with women and children, and when a small fire started on the ship shortly after the trip began, faulty equipment was unable to put it out or stop it from spreading. On top of that, the lifeboats were tied up and the crew, which never conducted emergency drills, was unprepared for a potential disaster. When parents put life preservers on their children and then had them enter the water, they soon learned that the life preservers were also faulty and didn’t float. As the disaster unfolded, over 1,000 passengers burned to death or drowned, many swept under the water by the East River’s current and weighed down by heavy wool clothing. Few people on board knew how to swim, exacerbating the situation, and eventually the overcrowded decks began to collapse, crushing some unfortunate victims. In the end, the General Slocum sank in shallow water while hundreds of corpses drifted ashore, and the fallout was immediate. The captain was indicted for criminal negligence and manslaughter, and the ship’s owner was also charged. While the captain would receive a 10 year sentence, the company in charge of the General Slocum got off with a light fine. In a somewhat fitting postscript, the ship was salvaged and converted into a barge, only to sink once again during a heavy storm in 1911.

I’d learn over time to insist on chatting by phone before hooking up. It was prudent, I thought, to see if the guy sounded like the type who might ejaculate and then murder me in the throes of shame, or lock me in his basement for the remainder of my life, or hold me down and rape me. Or drill holes in my head and inject boiling water and hydrochloric acid into my brain, the way Jeffrey Dahmer did with his hook-ups to try and turn them into sex zombies.

The first murder in Odessa occurred late in the nineteenth century when a cowboy rode into a water-drilling camp one afternoon and demanded something to eat from the cook. The cook, described as a “chinaman,” refused, so the cowboy promptly shot him. He was taken to San Angelo and put on trial, but the judge freed him on the grounds that there were no laws on the books making it illegal to kill a Chinaman.

If you want to get to the beginning of the shale revolution, pick up Interstate 35E out of Dallas and head north forty miles and then take the turnoff for the tiny town of Ponder. Pass the feed store, the white water tower, the sign for the Cowboy Church, and the donut store that’s closed down. Another four miles and you’re in Dish, Texas, population about 400. You end up at a wire mesh fence around a small tangle of pipes with a built-in stepladder. You’re there—the SH Griffin #4 natural gas well. The sign on the fence tells the date—DRILLED IN 1998.

Guar, mostly imported from India, is derived from the guar bean. It is used extensively in the food industry to assure consistency in cakes, pies, ice cream, breakfast cereals, and yogurt. But it has another major use—in fracking, in a Jell-O-like slosh that carries sand into the fractures to expand them. But guar and the related additives were expensive. At a baseball game in Dallas, Steinsberger ran into some other geologists who had successfully replaced much of the guar with water, but in another part of Texas and not in shale. In 1997, he experimented with their water recipe on a couple of shale wells, without success. Steinsberger got approval for one final try. This was the SH Griffin #4 in Dish. The team was still using water to replace most of the guar, but this time they fed in the sand more slowly. By the spring of 1998, they had the answer. “The well,” said Steinsberger, “was vastly superior to any other well that Mitchell had ever drilled.” The code for shale had been broken.

The molecules of a liquid roam all over. Think of the water molecules in the tub as a platoon of cadets running randomly around a practice field. When the temperature drops below freezing, it’s as if a drill sergeant blew a whistle and the cadets suddenly snapped into formation. The rigid order of the solid repels the hammer. The chaotic disorder of the liquid lets it slip through. Systems snap when the tide turns in a microscopic tug-of-war. Binding forces try to lock water molecules into rigid formation. Entropy, the tendency of systems to become more disordered, encourages those molecules to roam. As temperature decreases, binding forces get stronger and entropy forces get weaker. When the strengths of those two forces cross, the system snaps. Water freezes.

Ken was thrown backwards by Kevin’s powerful double heel kick. Kevin, having used the kitsune as a springboard, flipped through the air and landed in a crouch. The two-tailed fox was not so lucky. After sailing through the air, he hit the ground. Hard. “Urk!” Ken nearly swallowed his tongue as he slammed into the ground. He continued to tumble across the asphalt for several more feet before coming to a halt. Kevin stood back up and clapped his hands several times, wearing an expression that epitomized satisfaction. He turned his head to look at his mate and the flabbergasted kappa. “You just kicked a kitsune,” Kyle stated the obvious. “That I did.” Kevin nodded, quite proud of himself. This was the first time he’d managed that kick without landing on his back. “You two should get going. I can handle things here.” “You sure?” Kyle appeared dubious. “You may have gotten the drop on him, but that guy is still a kitsune, and, well, you’re just a human.” Two sets of cheeks puffed up simultaneously. “Don’t underestimate me! Who the hell do you think I am?” Kevin shouted, pointing at Kyle. Don’t underestimate my mate! Who the hell do you think he is?” Lilian also shouted. She was also pointing at Kyle. The kappa looked at the two of them, his face slowly deadpanning. “You two just did that in synch.” Kevin and Lilian tilted their heads at the same time. Their expressions were almost identical. “We did?” “Yes, you did.” The two might have responded to Kyle’s words, but they were forced to scramble out of the way when a drill made of water crashed into the ground, which cracked underneath the intense pressure. They looked at the person who’d created it—Ken, once again on his feet, with blood trailing down his forehead, and his two tails writhing in furious agitation. “Quit ignoring me!” “Oh, right,” Kevin muttered. “You’re still here.” “Are you saying you forgot about me already?!” “I’m sorry. You’re just not that important.” “What?!” Ken gawked. “That’s what happens when you’re a fop,” Lilian added. “Ugh.” “Yeah, nobody likes a fop,” Kevin agreed. “Gurk.” “Especially not pretty boy fops,” even Kyle got in on the action. “Shut up!” Ken growled, his cheeks almost neon red. “Shut up, shut up, shut up! I’ll show you! I’ll prove to all of you that I’m not a fop!” “Only someone who’s a fop would bother trying to prove that he’s not a fop,” Kevin chided.

What we cannot do, under any circumstances, is precisely what the fossil fuel industry is determined to do and what your government is so intent on helping them do: dig new coal mines, open new fracking fields, and sink new offshore drilling rigs. All that needs to stay in the ground. What we must do instead is clear: carefully wind down existing fossil fuel projects, at the same time as we rapidly ramp up renewables until we get global emissions down to zero globally by mid-century. The good news is that we can do it with existing technologies. The good news is that we can create millions of well-paying jobs around the world in the shift to a postcarbon economy - in renewables, in public transit, in efficiency, in retrofits, in cleaning up polluted land and water.

Lacking any other way to locate oil underground—dowsing and consulting spiritualists would come later—Drake chose to drill in the middle of the narrow island formed by Oil Creek on one side and, on the other, the water-powered sawmill’s millrace (a channel to divert water to a mill wheel).

Let us turn now to a study of a small Newfoundland fishing village. Fishing is, in England at any rate – more hazardous even than mining. Cat Harbour, a community in Newfoundland, is very complex. Its social relationships occur in terms of a densely elaborate series of interrelated conceptual universes one important consequence of which is that virtually all permanent members of the community are kin, ‘cunny kin’, or economic associates of all other of the 285 permanent members. The primary activity of the community is cod fishing. Salmon, lobster, and squid provide additional sources of revenue. Woodcutting is necessary in off-seasons. Domestic gardening, and stints in lumber camps when money is needed, are the two other profitable activities. The community's religion is reactionary. Women assume the main roles in the operation though not the government of the churches in the town. A complicated system of ‘jinking’ – curses, magic, and witchcraft – governs and modulates social relationships. Successful cod fishing in the area depends upon highly developed skills of navigation, knowledge of fish movements, and familiarity with local nautical conditions. Lore is passed down by word of mouth, and literacy among older fishermen is not universal by any means. ‘Stranger’ males cannot easily assume dominant positions in the fishing systems and may only hire on for salary or percentage. Because women in the community are not paid for their labour, there has been a pattern of female migration out of the area. Significantly, two thirds of the wives in the community are from outside the area. This has a predictable effect on the community's concept of ‘the feminine’. An elaborate anti-female symbolism is woven into the fabric of male communal life, e.g. strong boats are male and older leaky ones are female. Women ‘are regarded as polluting “on the water” and the more traditional men would not consider going out if a woman had set foot in the boat that day – they are “jinker” (i.e., a jinx), even unwittingly'. (It is not only relatively unsophisticated workers such as those fishermen who insist on sexual purity. The very skilled technicians drilling for natural gas in the North Sea affirm the same taboo: women are not permitted on their drilling platform rigs.) It would be, however, a rare Cat Harbour woman who would consider such an act, for they are aware of their structural position in the outport society and the cognition surrounding their sex….Cat Harbour is a male-dominated society….Only men can normally inherit property, or smoke or drink, and the increasingly frequent breach of this by women is the source of much gossip (and not a negligible amount of conflict and resentment). Men are seated first at meals and eat together – women and children eating afterwards. Men are given the choicest and largest portions, and sit at the same table with a ‘stranger’ or guest. Women work extremely demanding and long hours, ‘especially during the fishing season, for not only do they have to fix up to 5 to 6 meals each day for the fishermen, but do all their household chores, mind the children and help “put away fish”. They seldom have time to visit extensively, usually only a few minutes to and from the shop or Post Office….Men on the other hand, spend each evening arguing, gossiping, and “telling cuffers”, in the shop, and have numerous “blows” (i.e., breaks) during the day.’ Pre-adolescents are separated on sexual lines. Boys play exclusively male games and identify strongly with fathers or older brothers. Girls perform light women's work, though Faris indicates '. . . often openly aspire to be male and do male things. By this time they can clearly see the privileged position of the Cat Harbour male….’. Girls are advised not to marry a fisherman, and are encouraged to leave the community if they wish to avoid a hard life. Boys are told it is better to leave Cat Harbour than become fishermen....

By the end of that drilling program, they had the proof. Devon’s engineers had successfully yoked together the two technologies—slick water fracturing with horizontal drilling—to liberate natural gas imprisoned in the shale. “The rest was history,” Nichols would later say.

Botticelli’s St. Sebastian" I have seen a robin cock his head so, Listening for the change in weather, Feeling in the field’s pale grass turning paler The moment of his own departure. I have seen the bird throw his whole body In the air, and go, the small bird go. And the bared ground at once lose heart, As if taken by a sudden grippe. And I have seen blood wood, fire-grained As the stripped flesh, seen the long Boards of strong wood—when seen bound And bitten by the drill—spew up phases As curled and as extravagant as Sebastian’s gaze, The way the lover does at consummation, Lost to himself and the world, but still Safley shaded by the tree he rose from. I have seen, I have seen the lake’s heart When the rain comes through, when the water’s Dark flesh is driven, I have seen the heart Move like a doe through the woods, move Like a stunned doe, deeper and deeper, Through trees that turn and close behind her, The way water closes over a dropped stone, Or a torn limb, or a lasting wound … Oh, the forgotten traveler! Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Song. (BOA Editions; 1st edition 1995)

The first murder in Odessa occurred late in the nineteenth century when a cowboy rode into a water-drilling camp one afternoon and demanded something to eat from the cook. The cook, described as a “chinaman,” refused, so the cowboy promptly shot him. He was taken to San Angelo and put on trial, but the judge freed him on the grounds that there were no laws on the books making it illegal to kill a Chinaman. For

Keir was on a bench, removing his boots. Dishes were rattling off somewhere. Marcus must be making our meal. Keir glanced up. I risked a smile. “I think that Marcus is calming down.” “Really?” His expression did not change, but there was a hint of laughter in his voice. “Marcus?” he called out. “The warprize did not eat at noon.” The rattling dishes stilled and I heard an enraged cry. I hunched down as Marcus stomped into the room. “What? You think you live on air and light?” He glared at me, with both hands on his hips. “City dwellers.” He said it with disgust, and switched his glare to the larger man. “I had kavage with Joden and Simus.” I voiced a small protest. Marcus focused on me again. It was amazing how much anger one eye could hold. “You were told to take nothing except from the hand of the Warlord.” I cringed and looked over at Keir, who gazed at us both with a straight face. This time I was sure I saw a glimmer of laughter in those eyes. “Marcus is right.” Keir’s eyes grew serious. “While Simus and Joden have my trust, you are not to take anything from anyone else.” He rose from the bed and went to take his turn in the privy room. Marcus let loose a stream of words under his breath, and stomped out, using words and phrases that I did not understand. I sat there quietly as he stomped back in with two buckets of water for Keir. He was still muttering under his breath when he emerged, radiating anger with every step. I opened my mouth to say that I couldn’t have eaten if I couldn’t take food from another’s hand, but closed it quickly. Silence seemed wiser. Marcus returned with a heavy tray and started the dishes to rattling as he placed them on the table. “No food.” He transferred dishes at a rate that made me fear for my life. “Didn’t rest.” He stepped back, surveying his handiwork. “Rolled in muck pits, that she did.” That one eye was focused on me again. “Sit.” He pointed to the chair. I sat. “Hands.” I held them out, and Marcus poured the water over them, muttering something that did not sound like a prayer. “Eat.” He crossed his arms. “Shouldn’t I wait for…” My stomach chose that moment to express its interest in the food. At the sound, Marcus’ sole eye tapered its focus and drilled into me. “Eat.” I ate. As soon as my mouth was full, Marcus started to explain, in detail, the meaning of the words ‘food’ and ‘rest’. I decided that the wisest choice was to keep nodding and eating. Finally, Keir emerged from the privy room. “Marcus.” Marcus stopped and looked over. “Enough.” Marcus clamped his mouth tight, poured the water over Keir’s hands, then stomped off, muttering

Daniel and the Pelican As I drove home from work one afternoon, the cars ahead of me were swerving to miss something not often seen in the middle of a six-lane highway: a great big pelican. After an eighteen-wheeler nearly ran him over, it was clear the pelican wasn’t planning to move any time soon. And if he didn’t, the remainder of his life could be clocked with an egg timer. I parked my car and slowly approached him. The bird wasn’t the least bit afraid of me, and the drivers who honked their horns and yelled at us as they sped by didn’t impress him either. Stomping my feet, I waved my arms and shouted to get him into the lake next to the road, all the while trying to direct traffic. “C’mon beat it, Big Guy, before you get hurt!” After a brief pause, he cooperatively waddled to the curb and slid down to the water’s edge. Problem solved. Or so I thought. The minute I walked away he was back on the road, resulting in another round of honking, squealing tires and smoking brakes. So I tried again. “Shoo, for crying out loud!” The bird blinked, first one eye then the other, and with a little sigh placated me by returning to the lake. Of course when I started for my car it was instant replay. After two more unsuccessful attempts, I was at my wits’ end. Cell phones were practically non-existent back then, and the nearest pay phone was about a mile away. I wasn’t about to abandon the hapless creature and run for help. He probably wouldn’t be alive when I returned. So there we stood, on the curb, like a couple of folks waiting at a bus stop. While he nonchalantly preened his feathers, I prayed for a miracle. Suddenly a shiny red pickup truck pulled up, and a man hopped out. “Would you like a hand?” I’m seldom at a loss for words, but one look at the very tall newcomer rendered me tongue-tied and unable to do anything but nod. He was the most striking man I’d ever seen--smoky black hair, muscular with tanned skin, and a tender smile flanked by dimples deep enough to drill for oil. His eyes were hypnotic, crystal clear and Caribbean blue. He was almost too beautiful to be real. The embroidered name on his denim work shirt said “Daniel.” “I’m on my way out to the Seabird Sanctuary, and I’d be glad to take him with me. I have a big cage in the back of my truck,” the man offered. Oh my goodness. “Do you volunteer at the Sanctuary?” I croaked, struggling to regain my powers of speech. “Yes, every now and then.” In my wildest dreams, I couldn’t have imagined a more perfect solution to my dilemma. The bird was going to be saved by a knowledgeable expert with movie star looks, who happened to have a pelican-sized cage with him and was on his way to the Seabird Sanctuary.

[At Gunung Padang] First, the drill cores contained evidence--fragments of worked columnar basalt--that more man-made megalithic structures lay far beneath the surface. Secondly, the organic materials brought up in the drill cores began to yield older and older dates--3000 BC to 5000 BC, then 9600 BC as the drills bit deeper, then around 11,000 BC, then 15,000 BC and finally, at depths of 27.5 meters (90 feet) and more, an astonishing sequence of dates of 20,000 BC to 22,000 BC and earlier. [...] The problem is that those dates going back before 9600 BC take us deep into the last Ice Age, when Indonesia was not a series of islands as it is today but was part of a vast antediluvian Southeast Asian continent dubbed "Sundaland" by geologists. Sea level was 122 meters (400 feet) lower then. Huge ice caps 3.2 kilometers (2 miles) deep covered most of Europe and North America until the ice caps began to melt. Then all the water stored in them returned to the oceans and sea-level rose, submerging many parts of the world where humans had previously lived.

Dahmer pursed his lips and looked at the three of us before answering. “Well, I didn’t mention this because I didn’t think it was pertinent to the investigation, and I didn’t want you to think I was torturing anyone, because I wasn’t. Remember, I told you that I was always disappointed after I killed them? Well, this was because, as I said, I wanted to keep them with me. I really wanted a warm, living body to lie with and make love to. I was trying to come up with a way to keep them alive, but render them helpless and completely under my control. I thought if I could find a way to do this, I wouldn’t have to kill anymore. So I began experimenting by drilling small holes in the top of their heads and injecting them with a syringe filled with various solutions while they were alive but still unconscious from the Halcion. I tried a boiling water mix with the Soilex. Then I tried formaldehyde and even the muriatic acid.

Dahmer explained how he met fourteen-year-old Konerak Sinthasomphone at the Grand Avenue Mall, just like his brother before him. He offered him a hundred bucks to come home with him and take some nude photos. He gave him the drugged drink and performed oral sex on him while he was drugged. He diluted the muriatic acid with some water and injected it into the boy’s brain after drilling two small holes in the top of his head. The victim didn’t die like the other ones, and appeared to be sleeping, so Dahmer left the apartment and went up the street to a local tavern to buy some more beer. The boy apparently woke up and tried to escape because as Dahmer returned, he saw the victim standing in the street surrounded by the police and onlookers. “I already told you how I duped the officers into believing that everything was all right. After they left, I injected another solution into his brain to render him even more helpless, but he died. I was disappointed but got busy severing the flesh from the both of them, double bagged it, and threw it in the trash. I kept both of their skulls because I wanted something to remember them by and felt it was a waste to throw everything out.” I could hear the disappointment in Dahmer’s voice as he spoke.

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Chief Engineer Abbott was accused of: 1. Failure to assign members of his department to proper posts during the fire. 2. Failure to report to his own station in the engine room and consequently giving no instructions to his men. 3. Failure to hold proper fire drills. “Abbott had charge of the water pressure, and knew it to be inadequate,” the indictment asserted, “but did nothing to increase it. He also was responsible for the ship’s lighting and generators, and did nothing when they failed.” The chief engineer’s decision to abandon ship was also attacked: “He did not report at his lifeboat station; he failed to direct passengers to the boats; as a matter of fact he left the vessel in lifeboat one, and when he got in the lifeboat made no effort to rescue anyone else.

TODAY'S SPECIAL THE BEET IS THE MOST INTENSE of vegetables. The radish, admittedly, is more feverish, but the fire of the radish is a cold fire, the fire of discontent not of passion. Tomatoes are lusty enough, yet there runs through tomatoes an undercurrent of frivolity. Beets are deadly serious. Slavic peoples get their physical characteristics from potatoes, their smoldering inquietude from radishes, their seriousness from beets. The beet is the melancholy vegetable, the one most willing to suffer. You can't squeeze blood out of a turnip . . . The beet is the murderer returned to the scene of the crime. The beet is what happens when the cherry finishes with the carrot. The beet is the ancient ancestor of the autumn moon, bearded, buried, all but fossilized; the dark green sails of the grounded moon-boat stitched with veins of primordial plasma; the kite string that once connected the moon to the Earth now a muddy whisker drilling desperately for rubies. The beet was Rasputin's favorite vegetable. You could see it in his eyes. In Europe there is grown widely a large beet they call the mangel-wurzel. Perhaps it is mangel-wurzel that we see in Rasputin. Certainly there is mangel-wurzel in the music of Wagner, although it is another composer whose name begins, B-e-e-t——. Of course, there are white beets, beets that ooze sugar water instead of blood, but it is the red beet with which we are concerned; the variety that blushes and swells like a hemorrhoid, a hemorrhoid for which there is no cure. (Actually, there is one remedy: commission a potter to make you a ceramic asshole—and when you aren't sitting on it, you can use it as a bowl for borscht.) An old Ukrainian proverb warns, “A tale that begins with a beet will end with the devil.” That is a risk we have to take.

Roses Four roses drinking from a blue vase. The first one I name Moment of Gladness, the second, Wresting Beauty from Fear. All year I watched her disappearing, the sweet fat of her hips, her laughter, her will, as though a whelk had drilled through her shell, sucked out the flesh. Death woke me each morning with its bird impersonation. But now she has cut these Clouds of Glory and a honeyed musk sublimes from their petals, veined fine as an infant’s eyelids, and spiraling like any embryo—fish, snake, or human. And she has carried them to me, saturated in the colors they have not swallowed, the blush and gold, the razzle-dazzle red. Riven from the dirt to cling here briefly. And now, as though to signify our fortune, a tiny insect journeys across the kingdom of one ivory petal and into the heart of the blossom. O, Small Mercies sliced from the root. I listen as they sip the blue water.

Am Not Ready to Die Yet My death peers at the world through a plumeria tree The tree looks out over the neighbor’s house to the Pacific A blue water spirit commands this part of the earth mind Without question, it rules from the kingdom of secrets And tremendous fishes. I was once given to the water. My ashes will return there, But I am not ready to die yet— This morning I carry the desire to live, inside my thigh It pulses there: a banyan, a mynah bird, or a young impatient wind Until I am ready to fly again, over the pungent flowers Over the sawing and drilling workmen making a mess In the yard of the house next door— It is endless, this map of eternity. Beware the water monster that lives at the borders of doubt— He can swallow everything whole: all the delectable mangoes, dreams, and even the most faithful of planets— I was once given to the water. My ashes will return there, But I am not ready to die yet— And when it happens, as it certainly will, the lights Will go on in the city and the city will go on shining At the edge of the water—it is endless—this earthy mind— There will be flowers. There are always flowers, And a fine blessing rain will fall through the net of the clouds Bearing offerings to the stones, and to all who linger. It will be a day like any other. Someone will be hammering; someone will be frying fish. And at noon the workmen will go home to eat poi, pork, and rice.

frack a single well can take as many as six million gallons. In 2011, petroleum companies drilled twice as many new water wells—2,232 across the Lone Star State—as they did oil and gas wells.

A five gallon bucket with a hole drilled in the lid,” he said. “You put water, soap, and dirty clothes in it. You stick a plunger handle through the hole in the bucket lid, then put the lid on the bucket. You agitate it like you’re churning butter. It’s not perfect but it’s easier than a washboard.

And when it came to rigs, few were more impressive than the Deepwater Horizon. Roughly thirty stories tall and longer than a football field, this mobile, half-billion-dollar semisubmersible could function in water as deep as ten thousand feet and drill exploratory wells several miles deeper than that. Operating a rig this size cost around $1 million a day, but major oil companies considered the expense well worth it.

Tay retrieved a glimpse of himself making his way to the back of the drill, desperately trying to throw the giant motor into reverse.  And then the violent bucking of the drill, smashing into them. And finally, the massive surge of water sucking them toward the wall.

The fifth room was filled with steam and water vapor, which slammed into everyone when the doors opened, sending chills down their spines. It was almost as if the water vapor was trying to wrap an icy hand around their hearts. Two red pricks of light could be seen through the steam. It looked like a pair of eyes watching them, boring into them like a pair of drills. “Well, well, well” said a cool male voice. Anti-Toby’s heart stopped. His eyes were wide. He was terrified.

He would drill holes into the skulls of his living victims, then inject hydrochloric acid or boiling water into the frontal lobe area of their brains. When these experiments failed to achieve the desired result, Dahmer simply dispatched the unfortunate victim,

In April 2012, The New York Times published a heart-wrenching essay by Claire Needell Hollander, a middle school English teacher in the New York City public schools. Under the headline “Teach the Books, Touch the Heart,” she began with an anecdote about teaching John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men. As her class read the end together out loud in class, her “toughest boy,” she wrote, “wept a little, and so did I.” A girl in the class edged out of her chair to get a closer look and asked Hollander if she was crying. “I am,” she said, “and the funny thing is I’ve read it many times.” Hollander, a reading enrichment teacher, shaped her lessons around robust literature—her classes met in small groups and talked informally about what they had read. Her students did not “read from the expected perspective,” as she described it. They concluded (not unreasonably) that Holden Caulfield “was a punk, unfairly dismissive of parents who had given him every advantage.” One student read Lady Macbeth’s soliloquies as raps. Another, having been inspired by Of Mice and Men, went on to read The Grapes of Wrath on his own and told Hollander how amazed he was that “all these people hate each other, and they’re all white.” She knew that these classes were enhancing her students’ reading levels, their understanding of the world, their souls. But she had to stop offering them to all but her highest-achieving eighth-graders. Everyone else had to take instruction specifically targeted to boost their standardized test scores. Hollander felt she had no choice. Reading scores on standardized tests in her school had gone up in the years she maintained her reading group, but not consistently enough. “Until recently, given the students’ enthusiasm for the reading groups, I was able to play down that data,” she wrote. “But last year, for the first time since I can remember, our test scores declined in relation to comparable schools in the city. Because I play a leadership role in the English department, I felt increased pressure to bring this year’s scores up. All the teachers are increasing their number of test-preparation sessions and practice tests, so I have done the same, cutting two of my three classic book groups and replacing them with a test preparation tutorial program.” Instead of Steinbeck and Shakespeare, her students read “watered-down news articles or biographies, bastardized novels, memos or brochures.” They studied vocabulary words, drilled on how to write sentences, and practiced taking multiple-choice tests. The overall impact of such instruction, Hollander said, is to “bleed our English classes dry.” So

It wouldn’t be fair to say that my father had pushed me to become a doctor because he didn’t—at least not overtly. I had wanted to follow in my father’s footsteps from the very beginning. But ever since I was a child, he had very carefully nudged me in the specific direction of heart surgery by basically discounting every other profession in the world. He would say, “Son, what’s more important than keeping people’s hearts beating?” I thought I was so clever that once I had said, “What good is a beating heart without a functioning brain?” He had, of course, very quickly replied, “It’s as good as any beating heart. The important thing to note is that you can keep even a nonfunctioning brain alive as long as you have a beating heart. Doesn’t work the other way around, does it?” There had been about five minutes in my junior year of undergrad, when I had come home after reading about the use of power tools in orthopedic surgery, during which I had said to my father, “I think orthopedics is going to be my thing, Dad.” The next day he had brought home a trunk full of items from Home Depot and one extra-large cow femur bone. He then ran the cow bone over with his car in the driveway until it splintered, cracked, and broke in several places, and then he gave me a bag of tiny screws and bolts and a cordless drill. “Have at it, kid.” I had spent sixteen hours straight in the garage without so much as a drink of water. By the time I had finished, I was exhausted and thoroughly spent but proud of the fully assembled cow bone, which I paraded through the house. My mother was mortified and told my father he had created a monster. He just laughed from the couch, hollering back to me, “Looks pretty, but will it support sixteen hundred pounds?

Two days later, on June 19, Tobias and Chappell arrived on the island. Chappell had never been on the island when the pump was running and he was delighted. So delighted, in fact, that he agreed to extend Dad’s contract until the end of the year. Tobias agreed to cover the fuel costs during that time. Everyone was happy. The next day, Dad and Bobby resumed drilling in the Money Pit and, almost immediately, instead of encountering hard clay, they hit beach sand. That caused great excitement, as it indicated that their drill had found the spot where the original inlet water tunnel joined the Money Pit. But the next day, the pump shaft snapped and water immediately began to rise in the Money Pit. Bobby and Dad had to evacuate immediately. Later, in a letter to Frank Sparham, Dad described the event: Today we took the diamond (drill) and everything needed down. We got all set up and in the same hole and only a few inches of progress when the shaft snapped. Mildred heard the change of racket at once and nearly had a fit. We got everything out of the way and loaded in the (hoist) car in time. Could have done it faster but you know how these sudden emergencies are, both of us tried to do what the other fellow had been doing. We soon saw that was no good so we just went back to loading the (hoist) car as if we were through for the day and let the hoist bring up the electric cable.

Do you have some old storage containers that are cracked or missing their lid? Use them to grow vegetables or flowers.  Drill large holes, larger than the width of a pencil, in the bottom of the container. (Narrower holes don’t allow water to drain.)

Nick and Tesla went looking for Uncle Newt. They found him in the same place he’d been the last time they’d looked for him: the master bathroom on the second floor. They’d dragged him out of the shower for help with the rocket—even Tesla, bold as she could be, knew better than to try her luck with a power drill—and he must’ve jumped right back in the second he could. It was understandable, actually. His hair had still been half orange. The bathroom had what looked like a submarine airlock instead of a normal door, and unlike before it was now closed up tightly. When Nick and Tesla pressed their ears to the metal, they could dimly hear the sound of running water and Uncle Newt crooning “Winter Wonderland.” Outside, it was sunny and seventy degrees. “Gone awaaaaaaay is the something! Here to staaaaaaaay is the something! We da-da-da daaaaaa, la-la-la la laaaaaaa! Something in a something booby baaaaaaaa!” “Uncle Newt!” Tesla yelled. “Uncle Newt!” Nick yelled. “Uncle Newt!” they yelled together. “In the meadow we can something-something!” Uncle Newt sang. “And da-something something la-la-laaaaaa! We’ll have something something with the something! Until the who-who ha-has jooby jaaaaaaaa!” “Great,” Nick sighed. “He’s ignoring us now.” “I guess I can’t blame him,” said Tesla. “His hair was still half orange the last time we pulled him out of there.” “Well, I’m starving. Can we go see if the cat left us some cake?” Tesla thought it over, weighing her hunger against the chance of eating cake a cat had licked. She was very, very hungry. “Good idea,” she said.

Isaura, city of the thousand wells, is said to rise over a deep, subterranean lake. On all sides, wherever the inhabitants dig long vertical holes in the ground, they succeed in drawing up water, as far as the city extends, and no father. Its green border repeats the dark outline of the buried lake; an invisible landscape conditions the visible one; everything that moves in the sunlight is driven by the lapping wave enclosed beneath the rock's calcareous sky. Consequently, two forms of religion exist in Isaura. The city's gods, according to some people, live in the depths, in the black lake that feeds the underground streams. According to others, the gods live in the buckets that rise, suspended from a cable, as they appear over the edge of the wells, in the revolving pulleys, in the windlasses of the norias, in the pump handles, in the blades of the windmills that draw the water up from the drillings, in the trestles that support the twisting probes, in the reservoirs perched on stilts over the roofs, in the slender arches of the aqueducts, in all the columns of water, the vertical pipes, the plungers, the drains, all the way up to the weathercocks that surmount the airy scaffoldings of Isaura, a city that moves entirely upward.

Treasure Hunters Who Followed the Restalls When I started this book, I intended to tell the full Oak Island story, including those treasure hunters who came after the Restalls. But space will not allow it, so we will have to be satisfied with the briefest of highlights. • Robert Dunfield was the first treasure hunter after the accident. He had a causeway built connecting the mainland to Oak Island. It allowed mammoth equipment to be moved over to the island. Down at the Money Pit end of the island, no work was done to stop the sea water, but the huge machinery moved soil from this place to that in search of the treasure. The work gouged out part of the clearing so that the Money Pit, which had been 32 feet above sea level, was reduced to just 10 feet. His work drastically changed the terrain, giving free rein to the incoming sea water. It turned that end of the island into a huge heap of slippery mud. No treasure was found. • Dan Blankenship and David Tobias formed Triton Alliance Limited, the next treasure-hunting company. After drilling countless exploratory holes, they put down a mammoth caisson; Dan climbed down inside, but the caisson began to slowly collapse, threatening to crush the life out of him. He barely escaped. Before this near-fatal event, Triton had located and videotaped what many believe to be evidence of treasure within a huge cavern beneath the bedrock of the island. Their video also revealed what appears to be a human hand. • Oak Island Tours Inc., the final treasure-hunting company, is still at work on Oak Island. In fact, they have only just begun. This company includes a pervious Oak Island treasure hunter, Dan Blankenship, and four newcomers from Michigan--Craig Tester, Marty Lagina, Rick Lagina, and Alan J. Kostrzewa. It is reported that they possess adequate financing to see the job through to a successful end. I’ve exchanged emails with one of these men from Michigan and met face-to-face with another, and I’m convinced that they respect the island and the searchers who went before them and that they will give their search for treasure their very best effort. I wish them every success.

Then, all of a sudden, at 2 a.m. we heard an ear-splitting crash above us, and the vessel trembled. Everyone rushed out to see what had happened. A connection between two pipe lengths had broken somewhere. A giant counterweight atop the drilling derrick had slammed down onto the upper deck above us while 30 tons of pipe smashed into the seabed below, obliterating the pod with all the equipment I had just borrowed. We quickly realized why the accident had happened. Just before we’d sailed, our drilling contractor had quit in a pay dispute, and his inexperienced replacements didn’t realize that the last section of pipe they added needed to be superthick to keep the whole assembly from bending and breaking as the ship moved through the water. For want of a few extra bucks on the front end, we’d lost the $600,000 of equipment I’d borrowed, along with any chance to use Seaprobe to find Titanic. My pipe dream had turned into a pipe nightmare.