Wham Quotes

I'm kind of a low-key guy. The spotlight doesn't suit me. I'm more of a side dish--cole slaw or French fries or a Wham! backup singer.

Here's a phrase that apparently the airlines simply made up: near miss. They say that if 2 planes almost collide, it's a near miss. Bullshit, my friend. It's a near hit! A collision is a near miss. [WHAM! CRUNCH!] "Look, they nearly missed!" "Yes, but not quite.

Sometimes you're traveling a highway, the only road you've ever known and wham! A semi comes from nowhere and rolls right over you. Sometimes you dont wake up. But if you happen to you know things will never be the same. Sometimes that's not so bad. Sometimes lives instersect, no rhyme, no reason, except, perhaps, for a passing semi.

How awesome would that be? You open a box of Trix and wham! Out pops a hot guy! I would so eat more cereal.

You can be the idea dragon and I can be the WHAM BAM SHOVE A PINEAPPLE UP HIS SNOUT dragon!

Some catastrophic moments invite clarity, explode in split moments: You smash your hand through a windowpane and then there is blood and shattered glass stained with red all over the place; you fall out a window and break some bones and scrape some skin. Stitches and casts and bandages and antiseptic solve and salve the wounds. But depression is not a sudden disaster. It is more like a cancer: At first its tumorous mass is not even noticeable to the careful eye, and then one day -- wham! -- there is a huge, deadly seven-pound lump lodged in your brain or your stomach or your shoulder blade, and this thing that your own body has produced is actually trying to kill you. Depression is a lot like that: Slowly, over the years, the data will accumulate in your heart and mind, a computer program for total negativity will build into your system, making life feel more and more unbearable. But you won't even notice it coming on, thinking that it is somehow normal, something about getting older, about turning eight or turning twelve or turning fifteen, and then one day you realize that your entire life is just awful, not worth living, a horror and a black blot on the white terrain of human existence. One morning you wake up afraid you are going to live. In my case, I was not frightened in the least bit at the thought that I might live because I was certain, quite certain, that I was already dead. The actual dying part, the withering away of my physical body, was a mere formality. My spirit, my emotional being, whatever you want to call all that inner turmoil that has nothing to do with physical existence, were long gone, dead and gone, and only a mass of the most fucking god-awful excruciating pain like a pair of boiling hot tongs clamped tight around my spine and pressing on all my nerves was left in its wake. That's the thing I want to make clear about depression: It's got nothing at all to do with life. In the course of life, there is sadness and pain and sorrow, all of which, in their right time and season, are normal -- unpleasant, but normal. Depression is an altogether different zone because it involves a complete absence: absence of affect, absence of feeling, absence of response, absence of interest. The pain you feel in the course of a major clinical depression is an attempt on nature's part (nature, after all, abhors a vacuum) to fill up the empty space. But for all intents and purposes, the deeply depressed are just the walking, waking dead. And the scariest part is that if you ask anyone in the throes of depression how he got there, to pin down the turning point, he'll never know. There is a classic moment in The Sun Also Rises when someone asks Mike Campbell how he went bankrupt, and all he can say in response is, 'Gradually and then suddenly.' When someone asks how I love my mind, that is all I can say too

I glance down his body. He's still wearing his shorts and his shirt, and I still have my T-shirt on. Jeez-- talk about wham, bam, thank you ma'am.

The horror of knowing someone and living with them and even thinking you're lucky and then wham and now you know that every person is really two people and how can you ever know what the other half is up to.

And oil's not supposed to mix with water. But then someone invented mayonnaise, and wham - instant mixing.

My point is, I would never hurt you or your family.” I raised my chin at him. “If you tried to hurt my mother, I would totally kick your ass.” “Aha.” “Yes. You would be lying on the ground, crying, ‘No more, no more,’ and I would be kicking you in the stomach, wham, wham, wham!” He laughed softly.

Because the dumb slut slept with him, and he’s too nice to–” WHAM, out of nowhere he nose-butts me in the fist!

Before I could catch it, my heart slammed straight down to my feet, leaving me with a massive hole in my chest. It was amazing how I could just be going along, doing okay, and then suddenly-wham-I missed her so much even my fingernails hurt.

Without Warning: Sometimes your traveling a highway, the only road you've ever known and wham! A semi comes from nowhere and rolls right over you. Sometimes you don't wake up. But if you happen to, you know things will never be the same. Sometimes that's not so bad. Sometimes lives intersect, no rhyme, no reason, except, perhaps, for a passing semi.

What's it like? Being married? Cold feet. Middle of the night you're sleeping, suddenly, wham, you've got ice cold feet warming themselves on the back of your legs.

Without Warning Sometimes you're traveling a highway, the only road you've ever known, and wham! A semi comes from nowhere and rolls right over you.

the wham-bam-thank-you-and-maybe-I’ll-call-you-later-ma’am vibe from him? That’s called a Loganism,

want her to be mine. I don’t want the “wham bam thank you ma’am” with her.

Finest kind of dope. Book-Valium. No more heebie-jeebies. No more whim-whams

Being dropped by your stalker is pretty bad. I mean he watches you week-in, week-out for almost a year, and then you have sex and he’s like ‘wham, bam, thank you, ma’am. We no longer require your position as victim. Don’t call us; we’ll call you. It’s not you…it’s me. We’re just at different stages of our stalker/stalkee relationship. I need space.’ How pathetic are you? You’re actually ticked off that your stalker is no longer skulking around in the shadows. That’s just…pitiful.

Dan, this is crazy!" Amy quavered. "You can't drive a boat!" "Say's who? It's no different from Xbox!" Wham! The port-side rubber bumper at the launch's bow slammed into the end of an ancient cobblestone wharf. The small craft spun like a top, pitching Amy to the deck. Only an iron grip on the wheel saved Dan from a similar spill. He hung on for dear life. "Okay, scratch Xbox–think bumper cars! I rock at those! Remember the carnival?

Now Lewis joined in. 'A sicko walks into a bar,' he said. 'WHAM! And then i hit him with the bar again, an iron bar, and knock him flat, then i hit him again, and again and again until his brains are, like, smashed all over the pavement. And then i slice him up with my new katana!' 'Yeah, Lewis,' said Brooke. 'Funny joke. Way to lighten the mood, bruv.

Gods, she was as exquisite as her scent— Wham! The demons tackled him with the force of a freight train, flattening him on the field, piling on top of him.

I can be the WHAM BAM SHOVE A PINEAPPLE UP HIS SNOUT dragon!

You got it. Wham, bam, start the apocalypse, ma'am.

It was the first time! Just because there weren’t fireworks the first time doesn’t mean there will never be fireworks. We’re human; we’re adults; we teach each other; we communicate; fireworks don’t just go off, wham-bang; fireworks evolve!’ Awestruck by the utter, asinine nonsense of this metaphor, everyone is still. Into the stillness, the ample woman drops the word ‘Wrong.’ Then she says it again. ‘Wrong…I’m talking about science…Pheromones.’ The woman turns to Cornelia. ‘The chemicals in his body call out. The chemicals in your body answer. It either happens or it doesn’t.’ On top of being dumb, Cornelia is dumbfounded.

Whenever I’m around, nothing good ever happens. You can count on it. If I’m involved, then things go bad. Things are going smoothly, then I step in and wham! they fall apart

That fist he was raising at me would wham into the cupboard door, hurting only himself. I saw it all happening, then it really did happen. But I didn't understand the whore thing. Why was he confusing the drinking with the other? Then I got it. Obvious. It was all mixed up for him, all the same thing: the drinking, the other, anything that could make a woman free.

In our family "whim-wham" is code, a defanged reference to any number of moods and psychological disorders, be they depressive, manic, or schizoaffective. Back in the 1970s and '80s - when they were all straight depression - we called them "dark nights of the soul." St. John of the Cross's phrase ennobled our sickness, spiritualized it. We cut God out of it after the manic breaks started in 1986, the year my dad, brother, and I were all committed. Call it manic depression or by its new, polite name, bipolr disorder. Whichever you wish. We stick to our folklore and call it the whim-whams.

So I said Malakasham and Flora Bora Slam and Abra Wham, because everyone knew that you had to say magic words until magic happened.

Nothing here is like fighting vampires,' I said. 'It's more like fighting smoke. I think I liked it when I had an actual enemy to face.' 'Oh, don't worry, you have some. We just haven't seen them yet,' Jesse said. 'But we will. And wham we do...' She showed fang, just a flash; anybody who happened to catch a glimpse would have doubted their sanity, especially since the teeth disappeared in a flash. 'When we do, we'll settle this Morganville style.

Miles is the other kind. The kind that’s disarming enough that you don’t feel nervous talking to him, or like you need to show your best angle, until—wham! Suddenly, he’s smiling at you with his messy hair and impish smirk, and you realize his hotness has been boiling around you so slowly you missed it.

Your legs look goddamn incredible in that skirt." Her rejoinder died in her throat and came out sounding like, "Guhhhh wham." An uncharacteristic smile shaped his mouth. "Ah, you gotta love a bilingual girl." "Oh, no. You don't get to be funny, too." "Too?" "Here you go." She shoved the scavenger hunt list into his waiting hand and tried to hide her embarrassment with a saucy look. "Think you can keep up?" "We both know I can keep it up.

Scots, wha hae wi' Wallace bled; Scots, wham Bruce has aften led, Welcome to your glory bed, Or to victory.

Then, wham! My first grandchild was born... I was jolted, blindsided by a wallop of loving more intense than anything I could remember or had ever imagined.

Wham! Bam! Thank You Ma'am! - Suffragette City

Why do we say razzle-dazzle instead of dazzle-razzle? Why super-duper, helter-skelter, harum-scarum, hocus-pocus, willy-nilly, hully-gully, roly-poly, holy moly, herky-jerky, walkie-talkie, namby-pamby, mumbo-jumbo, loosey-goosey, wing-ding, wham-bam, hobnob, razza-matazz, and rub-a-dub-dub? I thought you'd never ask. Consonants differ in "obstruency"—the degree to which they impede the flow of air, ranging from merely making it resonate, to forcing it noisily past an obstruction, to stopping it up altogether. The word beginning with the less obstruent consonant always comes before the word beginning with the more obstruent consonant. Why ask why?

mad at me. For Dad, parenting has become just like shooting one of his stupid insurance ads-some makeup to cover the blemishes, a flashy smile, and wham! He's got himself a regular picture-perfect family.

Why couldn’t people just be who they were? Womanizers, drinkers, liars, and manipulators, instead of pretending around it all, hiding the secrets like dirty laundry stuffed under a bed, and then dying, so the grieving got whammed with two losses—the flesh-and-blood bodies and the images they thought they knew.

Clapping is easily the best example of self-amplification in the world. It sprouts from a single wham to a wave of sound in no time. As soon as someone clapped on hearing Tulsi’s name, an avalanche of applause followed.

Loki was hurling fire runes and holding a running commentary on her battle, to which no one but him was listening to. ‘And Thor gets in behind Frey and - WHAM! BOOM! That’s got to hurt. And Loki SCORES! This boy’s on FIRE!

I’d had a hard time getting out of bed in the morning. So I’d disabled my alarm’s snooze feature and instructed the computer to blast “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go” by Wham! I loathed that song with every fiber of my being,

Debbie wondered if it was true that there was only one person in the world for every person, and if she had already met him, and she either had to find a way to be around him again someday or always be alone. Romance-wise. She didn't quite believe this. What seemed more likely was that there were at least five or six people scattered around the globe who you could bump into and, wham, it would be the right thing.

But once in a while one loses his heart and once I think I did too, but never Mama. Her heart stays right in place and it's wham-bam-don't-give-a-damn every single time. Whatever she's got, that thing that can say good-bye like good-byes don't mean anything, I didn't get that. And the glass unicorn with the shiny gold horn and hooves that sits by my bed proves it, proves that I can't let go of things like Mama can.

So the first time I ever came into contact with O’Toole was at one of these very gatherings. I remember it well because I’d just punched Harold Pinter down a flight of stairs. Oh yes, I’m afraid so. No long dramatic pauses this time, Harold; he got one right on the side of the jaw. Wham!

I. Scots, wha hae wi' Wallace bled, Scots, wham Bruce has aften led; Welcome to your gory bed, Or to victorie! II. Now's the day, and now's the hour; See the front o' battle lour: See approach proud Edward's pow'r-- Chains and slaverie! III. Wha will be a traitor-knave? Wha can fill a coward's grave? Wha sae base as be a slave! Let him turn and flee! IV. Wha for Scotland's king and law Freedom's sword will strongly draw, Freeman stand, or freeman fa', Let him follow me! V. By oppression's woes and pains! By our sons in servile chains! We will drain our dearest veins, But they shall be free! VI. Lay the proud usurpers low! Tyrants fall in every foe! Liberty's in every blow!-- Let us do or die!

Miles is the other kind. The Kind that's disarming enough that you don't feel nervous talking to him, or like you need to show your best angle, until - wham! Suddenly, he's smiling at you with his messy hair and impish smirk, and you realize his hotness has been boiling around you so slowly you missed it.

Some people are story collectors. While others collect seashells, or stuffed animals, or stamps, story collectors wrap themselves in words, surround themselves with sentences, and play with participle, even those pesky, perky dangling ones. They climb over Cs and mount Ms and lounge in Ls. Soon enough they land in the land of homonyms, then, wham! They stumble into onomatopoeia, that lovely creaking, booming bit of wordplay - and that, Dear Friend, is where our story begins.

Art", "Bop" and "rock and roll" and whatever is all just a joke and a mistake, just a hunka foolishness so stop treating it with any seriousness or respect at all and just recognize the fact that it's nothing but a wham-o toy to bash around as you please in the nursery, it's nothing but a goddam Bonusburger so just gobble the stupid thing and burp and go for the next one tomorrow; and don't worry about the fact that it's a joke and a mistake and a bunch of foolishness as if that's gonna cause people to disregard it and do it in or let it dry up and die, because it is the strogest, most virulent, most invincible Superjoke in history, nothing could ever destroy it ever, and the reason for that is precisely that it is a joke, a mistake, foolishness. The first mistake of art is to assume that it's serious.

Gideon looked down at her necromancer. She had the heavy-lidded expression of someone who was concentrating in the knowledge that once they stopped concentrating, they would fall abruptly asleep. Harrow had gone unconscious once before: Gideon knew that the second time she let Harrow go under, there would probably not be any awakening. Harrow reached up - her hand was trembling - and tapped Gideon on the cheek. 'Nav,' she said, 'have you really forgiven me?' Confirmed. They were all going to eat it. 'Of course I have, you bozo.' 'I don't deserve it.' 'Maybe not,' said Gideon, 'but that doesn't stop me forgiving you. Harrow - ' 'Yes?' 'You know I don't give a damn about the Locked Tomb, right? You know I only care about you,' she said in a brokenhearted rush. She didn't know what she was trying to say, only that she had to say it now. With a bad, juddering noise, a tentacle had started to pound their splintering shelter again: WHAM. 'I'm no good at this duty thing. I'm just me. I can't do this without you.

A kite can't really fly free,that's just an expression. In order to soar high in the sky the string of a kite needs to be anchored. If the string breaks the kite drops back to the ground. The kite's freedom depends on it not being as free as he thinks it is.

A substantial daily intake of alcohol was the perfect way to stay in shape.

Just wham-bam, let me get back to playing Grand Theft Auto, ma’am.

Wham, bam, thank you, man with the big cock, that's how Stunt tried to love his life.

He had thanked me for letting him go down on me. I’d never claimed to be a genius, but I was pretty sure Kline Brooks had just wham, bam, and you can thank me, ma’amed me.

And wham! Suddenly. Just like that. I'm completely conscious of his guyness next to me.

Mothering is precarious. You try to do the right thing—you think you have—then wham.

I want to take a running leap, wrap my legs around his head, and force-feed him my pussy. This bitch needs some cock. Wham, bam, call me ma’am.

And the blade, above, in the canvas sky, like a homing hawk scythed down. Whisper-whisk-slither-thunder-rush—wham!

The crowd screamed, and in the same instant the band whammed into "Lady" like a desperate man into a ten-dollar prostitute.

This isn’t going to be a wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am. Luc’s a lover. He’s going to take it nice and slow. Make me ache for it.

Wham. She glommed onto him like white plastic on a Stormtrooper, shamelessly pressing against his body, groping and kissing.

We were supposed to be practical. A wham, bam, thank-you ma’am. We weren’t supposed to miss the sex, or the closeness, or the cuddling when this ends.

If we are to go by what the movies and novels tell us, falling in love just happens. If it is a Hindi movie, you hear a melodious track in the background, the lyrics usually waxing eloquent about the heroine’s beauty, comparing various parts of her anatomy to the moon, stars, the sun—even Fevicol. This is accompanied by the hero gazing at her with the expression of a glutton discovering a six-course banquet consisting of various gastronomical delights. In real life though, falling in love often happens over a period of time. You see someone gorgeous and get attracted strongly. If you strike up a conversation, find each other likable—or intriguing, as the case may be—then you exchange phone numbers or email ids. After a couple of dates, discovering many things and maybe a kiss or something more, depending on how much in resonance your moral compasses are, the magic happens, and wham, you are in love.

I remember reading once that when a seagull dies it falls out of the sky on the spot. You could be just sitting on the beach, enjoying an orange ice pop, and wham, seagull to the head.

My eyes were still closed when Damian grabbed my left hand, forced it palm-down on the cutting board and WHAM! He severed the tip of my pinky finger off, sliced the top third—nail, bone and all—clean off,

He'd never empathized with Rachel more than he did in those moments, imagining what it would be like to be innocently eating lunch with a person who had been acting for all the world as though he liked you, who had given you no hint that anything was bothering him at all, when suddenly, out of nowhere, wham, it turned out you were completely wrong about him, and that everything he'd been telling you was a lie.

Do not despair—many are happy much of the time; more eat than starve, more are healthy than sick, more curable than dying; not so many dying as dead; and one of the thieves was saved. Hell's bells and all's well—half the world is at peace with itself, and so is the other half; vast areas are unpolluted; millions of children grow up without suffering deprivation, and millions, while deprived, grow up without suffering cruelties, and millions, while deprived and cruelly treated, none the less grow up. No laughter is sad and many tears are joyful. At the graveside the undertaker doffs his top hat and impregnates the prettiest mourner. Wham, bam, thank you Sam.

Life is crazy, and sometimes it totally veers off course. Seriously, sometimes it flows by nice and smooth and then wham! you get bitch-slapped out of nowhere by events and coincidences that seem nigh unbelievable. Is this what the poets call fate or destiny or karma? Maybe.

It was not Mrs Thatcher who made it possible for groups like Wham! to become rich and famous. If anything, the reverse was true. It was groups like Wham! – or more accurately their forerunners in the 1960s and 1970s, with all their talk of fighting the system, standing up to the Establishment, being who you wanted to be and living your life on your own terms – who opened the door for Mrs Thatcher. By undermining the institutions that had dominated British life for decades, by emphasizing the importance of self-gratification and by celebrating the value of the individual, Lennon and his contemporaries made it much easier for younger voters, in particular, to embrace her free-market message.

The sun comes every day. Save the string. I put it in lines across the room. I watched him creep his body though the grilled windows. When the sun touches the first string wham it is 10 o'clock. It is 2 o'clock when he touches the second. When the shadow of the first string is under the second string it is 4 o'clock. When it reaches the door it will soon be dark.

Furious, the beast writhed and wriggled its iterated integrals beneath the King’s polynomial blows, collapsed into an infinite series of indeterminate terms, then got back up by raising itself to the nth power, but the King so belabored it with differentials and partial derivatives that its Fourier coefficients all canceled out (see Riemann’s Lemma), and in the ensuing confusion the constructors completely lost sight of both King and beast. So they took a break, stretched their legs, had a swig from the Leyden jug to bolster their strength, then went back to work and tried it again from the beginning, this time unleashing their entire arsenal of tensor matrices and grand canonical ensembles, attacking the problem with such fervor that the very paper began to smoke. The King rushed forward with all his cruel coordinates and mean values, stumbled into a dark forest of roots and logarithms, had to backtrack, then encountered the beast on a field of irrational numbers (F1) and smote it so grievously that it fell two decimal places and lost an epsilon, but the beast slid around an asymptote and hid in an n-dimensional orthogonal phase space, underwent expansion and came out, fuming factorially, and fell upon the King and hurt him passing sore. But the King, nothing daunted, put on his Markov chain mail and all his impervious parameters, took his increment Δk to infinity and dealt the beast a truly Boolean blow, sent it reeling through an x-axis and several brackets—but the beast, prepared for this, lowered its horns and—wham!!—the pencils flew like mad through transcendental functions and double eigentransformations, and when at last the beast closed in and the King was down and out for the count, the constructors jumped up, danced a jig, laughed and sang as they tore all their papers to shreds, much to the amazement of the spies perched in the chandelier-—perched in vain, for they were uninitiated into the niceties of higher mathematics and consequently had no idea why Trurl and Klapaucius were now shouting, over and over, “Hurrah! Victory!!

Wealth is a process, not an event. Ask any chef and they will confirm that the perfect dish is a series of ingredients and a well-engineered process of execution: a little this, a little that, done at the right time at the right place, and wham, you have a tasty meal. Wealth creation has the same method of execution—a mixed collection of many disassociated ingredients into an consolidated whole that has value and is worth millions.

Mona´s Law apparently states that everyone wants three things - that happiness is made up on three - piece jigsaw: a good relationship, a nice place to live, and a good job. And Mona´s law states that it is mathematically impossible to maintain more than two out of the three. Thus, if you have a good job and a nice flat and you meet a lovely guy, bam-you lose your job. So you change jobs and find the perfect undreamt-of work opportunity, and wham, your landlord kicks you out on the street.

The light catches his wild, wild hair and holds it. And wham! Suddenly. Just like that. I'm completely conscious of his guyness next to me. His long legs. The way he walks, fluid, easy, like he's made to walk through water But at the same time with purpose, which makes him seem taller than he is. There aren't a lot of guys my age who walk like this. With swagger. It's as if I've suddenly discovered he's male. My face is hot and my back is damp and I'm thinking about Pauline Potter, sexing off all that weight, and I'm staring at his hands...

Suppose you’d watched the slow accretion of snow over thousands of years as it was compressed and pushed over the deep rock until the glacier calved its icebergs into the sea, and you watched an iceberg drift out through the chilly waters, and you got to know its cargo of happy polar bears and seals as they looked forward to a brave new life in the other hemisphere where they say the ice floes are lined with crunchy penguins, and then wham—tragedy loomed in the shape of thousands of tons of unaccountably floating iron and an exciting soundtrack… …

I stepped to the tank's edge, leaned in, and concentrated on keeping my eyes open. Which fish would be the shooter? The fish were all facing me, but one in particular seemed to be staring directly at my left eye, like a hunter targeting his prey. Wham! The water hit my pupil with such force that I jerked back …. Laughing, I wiped my left eye but stayed by the tank, my left hand resting on its edge. Another fish quickly seized the opportunity to blast the diamond in my engagement ring, while a third targeted the red carnelian stone in my earring, and yet another shot my right eye.

We got pregnant with Angel almost by accident. I was thinking it was just about time to go on birth control and wham-it happened. We wanted two children, but were thinking of spacing them out a little more. God and Angel had other plans. I’m so glad. Bubba and Angel are so close in age and such good friends that I can’t imagine it any other way. But at the time, I was more than a little apprehensive about it. Once again, it worked out that Chris was preparing to leave just when I was due. They say God only gives you what you can handle. Chris didn’t cope with crying babies very well. So either he paid the military to deploy him with each baby, or God was looking out for him with well-timed, newborn-avoiding deployments. This time, the Team guy karma worked: the sonogram technician confirmed it was a girl several months into the pregnancy. She was going to be the first female born into the Kyle side of the family in eighty years. Which made her unique, and her grandparents particularly tickled. Chris couldn’t resist the opportunity to tease them with the news. “We’re having a boy,” he said when he called them back in Texas with the news. “Oh, how nice,” they said. “No, we’re having a girl.” “Whoo-hoo!” they shouted. “No, we’re having a boy.” “Chris! Which is it!?” “A girl!” If they could have gotten away to visit us that night, I doubt they would have needed an airplane to fly.

The boys are barely old enough To grow a beard. But here’s something interesting, Maybe even a little weird. One of those boys Has volunteered! You’re familiar with the type. Good shoulders. Good teeth. Believes his own hype. And now, just to add a little fun, Some folks say That he’s my son! I guess it’s possible, you know. I’ve had so many one-night stands, So many whams and bams and thank-me-ma’ams, I can’t keep track of every mademoiselle. Plus, I’m not the type to kiss and tell. Well, if I’m honest, I’m not the type to kiss. But truth is, his mother, Aethra, was in a mess — A sweet young thing, courted, prized. Next thing you know she’s spermatized By Aegeus, who is King of Athens. Of course. None other.

Our Meat Facial today, Ms. Loeffler?” “Uhm, how’s that.” “You didn’t get our offer in the mail? on special all this week, works miracles for the complexion—freshly killed, of course, before those enzymes’ve had a chance to break down, how about it?” “Well, I don’t . . .” “Wonderful! Morris, kill . . . the chicken!” From the back room comes horrible panicked squawking, then silence. Maxine meantime is tilted back, eyelids aflutter, when— “Now we’ll just apply some of this,” wham! “. . . meat here, directly onto this lovely yet depleted face . . .” “Mmff . . .” “Pardon? (Easy, Morris!)” “Why is it . . . uh, moving around like that? Wait! is that a— are you guys putting a real dead chicken in my— aaahhh!” “Not quite dead yet!” Morris jovially informs the thrashing Maxine as blood and feathers fly everywhere. Each

You know what the best course I ever took at college was? Biology. We studied evolution. And I learned something important.’ Now he included Leonard in his gaze. ‘It helped me choose my career. For thousands, no, millions of years we had these huge brains, the neo-cortex, right? But we didn’t speak to each other, and we lived like fucking pigs. There was nothing. No language, no culture, nothing. And then, suddenly, wham! It was there. Suddenly it was something we had to have, and there was no turning back. So why did it suddenly happen?’ Russell shrugged. ‘Hand of God?’ ‘Hand of God my ass. I’ll tell you why. Back then we all used to hang out together all day long doing the same thing. We lived in packs. So there was no need for language. If there was a leopard coming, there was no point saying, Hey man, what’s coming down the track? A leopard! Everyone could see it, everyone was jumping up and down and screaming, trying to scare it off. But what happens when someone goes off on his own for a moment’s privacy? When he sees a leopard coming, he knows something the others don’t. And he knows they don’t know. He has something they don’t, he has a secret, and this is the beginning of his individuality, of his consciousness. If he wants to share his secret and run down the track to warn the other guys, then he’s going to need to invent language. From there grows the possibility of culture. Or he can hang back and hope the leopard will take out the leadership that’s been giving him a hard time. A secret plan, that means more individuation, more consciousness.’ The band was starting to play a fast, loud number. Glass had to shout his conclusion, ‘Secrecy made us possible,’ and Russell raised his beer to salute the theory.

So they rolled up their sleeves and sat down to experiment -- by simulation, that is mathematically and all on paper. And the mathematical models of King Krool and the beast did such fierce battle across the equation-covered table, that the constructors' pencils kept snapping. Furious, the beast writhed and wriggled its iterated integrals beneath the King's polynomial blows, collapsed into an infinite series of indeterminate terms, then got back up by raising itself to the nth power, but the King so belabored it with differentials and partial derivatives that its Fourier coefficients all canceled out (see Riemann's Lemma), and in the ensuing confusion the constructors completely lost sight of both King and beast. So they took a break, stretched their legs, had a swig from the Leyden jug to bolster their strength, then went back to work and tried it again from the beginning, this time unleashing their entire arsenal of tensor matrices and grand canonical ensembles, attacking the problem with such fervor that the very paper began to smoke. The King rushed forward with all his cruel coordinates and mean values, stumbled into a dark forest of roots and logarithms, had to backtrack, then encountered the beast on a field of irrational numbers (F_1) and smote it so grievously that it fell two decimal places and lost an epsilon, but the beast slid around an asymptote and hid in an n-dimensional orthogonal phase space, underwent expansion and came out fuming factorially, and fell upon the King and hurt him passing sore. But the King, nothing daunted, put on his Markov chain mail and all his impervious parameters, took his increment Δk to infinity and dealt the beast a truly Boolean blow, sent it reeling through an x-axis and several brackets—but the beast, prepared for this, lowered its horns and—wham!!—the pencils flew like mad through transcendental functions and double eigentransformations, and when at last the beast closed in and the King was down and out for the count, the constructors jumped up, danced a jig, laughed and sang as they tore all their papers to shreds, much to the amazement of the spies perched in the chandelier—perched in vain, for they were uninitiated into the niceties of higher mathematics and consequently had no idea why Trurl and Klapaucius were now shouting, over and over, "Hurrah! Victory!!

Of course he’d marched his outrage off to Crake. He’d whammed the furniture: those were his furniture-whamming days. What Crake had to say was this: “Jimmy, look at it realistically. You can’t couple a minimum access to food with an expanding population indefinitely. Homo sapiens doesn’t seem able to cut himself off at the supply end. He’s one of the few species that doesn’t limit reproduction in the face of dwindling resources. In other words – and up to a point, of course – the less we eat, the more we fuck.” “How do you account for that?” said Jimmy. “Imagination,” said Crake. “Men can imagine their own deaths, they can see them coming, and the mere thought of impending death acts like an aphrodisiac. A dog or a rabbit doesn’t behave like that. Take birds – in a lean season they cut down on the eggs, or they won’t mate at all. They put their energy into staying alive themselves until times get better. But human beings hope they can stick their souls into someone else, some new version of themselves, and live on forever.” “As a species we’re doomed by hope, then?” “You could call it hope. That, or desperation.” “But we’re doomed without hope, as well,” said Jimmy. “Only as individuals,” said Crake cheerfully. “Well, it sucks.” “Jimmy, grow up.” Crake wasn’t the first person who’d ever said that to Jimmy.

Of course he’d marched his outrage off to Crake. He’d whammed the furniture: those were his furniture-whamming days. What Crake had to say was this: “Jimmy, look at it realistically. You can’t couple a minimum access to food with an expanding population indefinitely. Homo sapiens doesn’t seem able to cut himself off at the supply end. He’s one of the few species that doesn’t limit reproduction in the face of dwindling resources. In other words – and up to a point, of course – the less we eat, the more we fuck.” “How do you account for that?” said Jimmy. “Imagination,” said Crake. “Men can imagine their own deaths, they can see them coming, and the mere thought of impending death acts like an aphrodisiac. A dog or a rabbit doesn’t behave like that. Take birds – in a lean season they cut down on the eggs, or they won’t mate at all. They put their energy into staying alive themselves until times get better. But human beings hope they can stick their souls into someone else, some new version of themselves, and live on forever.” “As a species we’re doomed by hope, then?” “You could call it hope. That, or desperation.” “But we’re doomed without hope, as well,” said Jimmy. “Only as individuals,” said Crake cheerfully. “Well, it sucks.” “Jimmy, grow up.” Crake wasn’t the first person who’d ever said that to Jimmy.

You should buy a potted plant.” I laugh at that as I sit on the wooden picnic table at the park in the dark, listening to Jack ramble through the speakerphone beside me. “A plant.” “Seriously, hear me out—you get a plant. You nurture it, keep it alive, and wham-bam, that’s how you know you’re ready for this whole thing.” “That’s stupid.” “No, it’s not. It’s a real thing. I saw it in that movie 28 Days.” “The zombie one?” “Nah, man, the Sandra Bullock one. You’re thinking about 28 Days Later.” “You steal your advice from Sandra Bullock movies?” “Oh, don’t you fucking judge me. It’s a hell of a lot better than that shit you keep making. And besides, it’s good advice.” “Buy a plant.” “Yes.” “Did you buy one?” “What?” “A plant,” I say. “Did you buy yourself a plant to prove you’re ready for a relationship?” “No,” he says. “Why not?” “Because I don’t need a plant to tell me what I already know,” he says. “I’m wearing a pair of emoji boxers and eating hot Cheetos in my basement apartment. Pretty sure the signs are all there.” “Emoji boxers?” I laugh. “Talk about a stereotypical internet troll.” “Yeah, yeah, whatever,” he says. “This isn’t about me, though. We’re talking about you.” “I’m tired of talking about me.” “Holy shit, seriously? Didn’t think that was possible!” “Funny.” “Remember that interview you did on The Late Show two years ago?” “I don’t want to talk about it.” “You were stoned out of your mind, kept referring to yourself in third person.” “Fuck off.” “Pretty sure that guy would never be tired of talking about himself.” “You’re an asshole.” He laughs. “True.” “You get on my nerves.” “You’re welcome.” Sighing, I shake my head. “Thank you.” “Now go buy yourself a plant,” he says. “I was in the middle of a game of Call of Duty when you called, so I’m going to get back to it.” “Yeah, okay.” “Oh, and Cunning? I’m glad you haven’t drowned yourself in a bottle of whiskey.” “Why? Would you miss me?” “More like your fangirls might murder me if I let you destroy yourself,” he says. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but they’re crazy. Have you seen some of their fan art? It’s insane.” “Goodbye, Jack,” I say, pressing the button on my phone to end the call

Not long after I learned about Frozen, I went to see a friend of mine who works in the music industry. We sat in his living room on the Upper East Side, facing each other in easy chairs, as he worked his way through a mountain of CDs. He played “Angel,” by the reggae singer Shaggy, and then “The Joker,” by the Steve Miller Band, and told me to listen very carefully to the similarity in bass lines. He played Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love” and then Muddy Waters’s “You Need Love,” to show the extent to which Led Zeppelin had mined the blues for inspiration. He played “Twice My Age,” by Shabba Ranks and Krystal, and then the saccharine ’70s pop standard “Seasons in the Sun,” until I could hear the echoes of the second song in the first. He played “Last Christmas,” by Wham! followed by Barry Manilow’s “Can’t Smile Without You” to explain why Manilow might have been startled when he first heard that song, and then “Joanna,” by Kool and the Gang, because, in a different way, “Last Christmas” was an homage to Kool and the Gang as well. “That sound you hear in Nirvana,” my friend said at one point, “that soft and then loud kind of exploding thing, a lot of that was inspired by the Pixies. Yet Kurt Cobain” — Nirvana’s lead singer and songwriter — “was such a genius that he managed to make it his own. And ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’?” — here he was referring to perhaps the best-known Nirvana song. “That’s Boston’s ‘More Than a Feeling.’ ” He began to hum the riff of the Boston hit, and said, “The first time I heard ‘Teen Spirit,’ I said, ‘That guitar lick is from “More Than a Feeling.” ’ But it was different — it was urgent and brilliant and new.” He played another CD. It was Rod Stewart’s “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy,” a huge hit from the 1970s. The chorus has a distinctive, catchy hook — the kind of tune that millions of Americans probably hummed in the shower the year it came out. Then he put on “Taj Mahal,” by the Brazilian artist Jorge Ben Jor, which was recorded several years before the Rod Stewart song. In his twenties, my friend was a DJ at various downtown clubs, and at some point he’d become interested in world music. “I caught it back then,” he said. A small, sly smile spread across his face. The opening bars of “Taj Mahal” were very South American, a world away from what we had just listened to. And then I heard it. It was so obvious and unambiguous that I laughed out loud; virtually note for note, it was the hook from “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy.” It was possible that Rod Stewart had independently come up with that riff, because resemblance is not proof of influence. It was also possible that he’d been in Brazil, listened to some local music, and liked what he heard.

Wimmy Wham Wham Wozzle

It's normally just wham, bam, thank you ma'am, (...)

What is it with Florida? In Pensacola, Jack Crawford answered his door only to get cracked on the head with a bat. “About 8:45 p.m., three teenage males knocked on the door.” As soon as Crawford opened the door, “Wham! Split my head open,” Crawford said. “So I shot him and another guy.” Of the three intruders, one was white. “Crawford said he wasn’t too rattled by the attack, and he still felt comfortable staying in the home.” Crawford is not in danger of prosecution because of Florida’s “Stand your Ground” law.9

Have you seen Beau fight? It's Black Ops shit. Like, wham!

Adventure novels tend to be larger than life. They involve lots of wham-bam and don’t usually require a lot of extra thinking on the reader’s part the way a mystery or thriller might.

Was it like losing it all over again when Bram gave you the ram? The Bram ram. Wham, bam, thank you Bram?” She

Here’s the worst detail of all—worse than Wham! even, if you can believe it. It all happened at Applebee’s. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not a snob. I don’t have a problem with Applebee’s per se. But I think we can all agree, as a civilized society, that lives shouldn’t change there. Significant things shouldn’t begin or end at Applebee’s. You shouldn’t walk into Applebee’s as one thing and then leave as something else entirely. She

SpottieOttieDopaliscious [Hook] Damn damn damn James [Verse 1: Sleepy Brown] Dickie shorts and Lincoln's clean Leanin', checking out the scene Gangsta boys, blizzes lit Ridin' out, talkin' shit Nigga where you wanna go? You know the club don't close 'til four Let's party 'til we can't no more Watch out here come the folks (Damn - oh lord) [Verse 2: André 3000] As the plot thickens it gives me the dickens Reminiscent of Charles a lil' discotheque Nestled in the ghettos of Niggaville, USA Via Atlanta, Georgia a lil' spot where Young men and young women go to experience They first li'l taste of the night life Me? Well I've never been there; well perhaps once But I was so engulfed in the Olde E I never made it to the door you speak of, hardcore While the DJ sweatin' out all the problems And the troubles of the day While this fine bow-legged girl fine as all outdoors Lulls lukewarm lullabies in your left ear Competing with "Set it Off," in the right But it all blends perfectly let the liquor tell it "Hey hey look baby they playin' our song" And the crowd goes wild as if Holyfield has just won the fight But in actuality it's only about 3 A.M And three niggas just don' got hauled Off in the ambulance (sliced up) Two niggas don' start bustin' (wham wham) And one nigga don' took his shirt off talkin' 'bout "Now who else wanna fuck with Hollywood Courts?" It's just my interpretation of the situation [Hook] [Verse 3: Big Boi] Yes, when I first met my SpottieOttieDopalicious Angel I can remember that damn thing like yesterday The way she moved reminded me of a Brown Stallion Horse with skates on, ya know Smooth like a hot comb on nappy ass hair I walked up on her and was almost paralyzed Her neck was smelling sweeter Than a plate of yams with extra syrup Eyes beaming like four karats apiece just blindin' a nigga Felt like I chiefed a whole O of that Presidential My heart was beating so damn fast Never knowing this moment would bring another Life into this world Funny how shit come together sometimes (ya dig) One moment you frequent the booty clubs and The next four years you & somebody's daughter Raisin' y'all own young'n now that's a beautiful thang That's if you're on top of your game And man enough to handle real life situations (that is) Can't gamble feeding baby on that dope money Might not always be sufficient but the United Parcel Service & the people at the Post Office Didn't call you back because you had cloudy piss So now you back in the trap just that, trapped Go on and marinate on that for a minute

He was a little monster,” Bob said, laughing, about Steve as a child. The main difficulty wasn’t unruly behavior. It was Steve’s insatiable curiosity about the bush and the wildlife in it. “For the first few months, when he was a baby, I could put Steve down and he would stay where I put him,” Lyn told me. “But after he started to get around on his own, it was all over. I would find him either on the roof or up in some tree.” When the family headed off on a trip, usually to North Queensland on wildlife jaunts, Steve could always be counted on to be elsewhere when they were ready to go. They would find him next to the nearest stream, snagging yabbies or turning over bits of wood to see what was hidden underneath. “He was never where we wanted him to be,” Lyn recalled with a laugh. Steve’s childhood was “family, wildlife, and sport,” he told me. He played rugby league for the Caloundra Sharks in high school and was picked to play rugby for the Queensland Schoolboys and represent the state, but he chose to go on a field trip with his dad to catch reptiles instead. Sometimes sport and wildlife mixed in unexpected ways. Both was an expert badminton player, and a preteen Steve decided to layout a badminton court in the family’s backyard one day. He had a brolga as a friend, a large bird that he called Brolly. Brolly objected to Steve rearranging her territory. She waited until his back was turned and then attacked. Wham! A brolga’s beak is a fearsome weapon, and Brolly’s slammed into the back of little Stevo’s head. His bird friend knocked him out cold. “Go ahead, feel it,” Steve said after regaling me with this story. He bent his head. I could still feel a knot of scar tissue, a souvenir of the brolga attack years earlier.

Wham, bam, thank you, but I won’t have time to make sweet lovin’ to your daughter today, ma’am.

When Angelina had scored, Harry had done a couple of loop-the-loops to let off his feelings. Now he was back to staring around for the Snitch. Once he caught sight of a flash of gold, but it was just a reflection from one of the Weasleys’ wristwatches, and once a Bludger decided to come pelting his way, more like a cannonball than anything, but Harry dodged it and Fred Weasley came chasing after it. “All right there, Harry?” he had time to yell, as he beat the Bludger furiously toward Marcus Flint. “Slytherin in possession,” Lee Jordan was saying, “Chaser Pucey ducks two Bludgers, two Weasleys, and Chaser Bell, and speeds toward the — wait a moment — was that the Snitch?” A murmur ran through the crowd as Adrian Pucey dropped the Quaffle, too busy looking over his shoulder at the flash of gold that had passed his left ear. Harry saw it. In a great rush of excitement he dived downward after the streak of gold. Slytherin Seeker Terence Higgs had seen it, too. Neck and neck they hurtled toward the Snitch — all the Chasers seemed to have forgotten what they were supposed to be doing as they hung in midair to watch. Harry was faster than Higgs — he could see the little round ball, wings fluttering, darting up ahead — he put on an extra spurt of speed — WHAM! A roar of rage echoed from the Gryffindors below — Marcus Flint had blocked Harry on purpose, and Harry’s broom spun off course, Harry holding on for dear life. “Foul!” screamed the Gryffindors. Madam Hooch spoke angrily to Flint and then ordered a free shot at the goalposts for Gryffindor. But in all the confusion, of course, the Golden Snitch had disappeared from sight again. Down

night, there was a real bad thunderstorm. But what woke me up wasn’t the thunder and lightning. It was Winn-Dixie, whining and butting his head against my bedroom door. “Winn-Dixie,” I said. “What are you doing?” He didn’t pay any attention to me. He just kept beating his head against the door and whining and whimpering; and when I got out of bed and went over and put my hand on his head, he was shaking and trembling so hard that it scared me. I knelt down and wrapped my arms around him, but he didn’t turn and look at me or smile or sneeze or wag his tail, or do any normal kind of Winn-Dixie thing; he just kept beating his head against the door and crying and shaking. “You want the door open?” I said. “Huh? Is that what you want?” I stood up and opened the door and Winn-Dixie flew through it like something big and ugly and mean was chasing him. “Winn-Dixie,” I hissed, “come back here.” I didn’t want him going and waking the preacher up. But it was too late. Winn-Dixie was already at the other end of the trailer, in the preacher’s room. I could tell because there was a sproi-i-ing sound that must have come from Winn-Dixie jumping up on the bed, and then there was a sound from the preacher like he was real surprised. But none of it lasted long, because Winn-Dixie came tearing back out of the preacher’s room, panting and running like crazy. I tried to grab him, but he was going too fast. “Opal?” said the preacher. He was standing at the door to his bedroom, and his hair was all kind of wild on top of his head, and he was looking around like he wasn’t sure where he was. “Opal, what’s going on?” “I don’t know,” I told him. But just then there was a huge crack of thunder, one so loud that it shook the whole trailer, and Winn-Dixie came shooting back out of my room and went running right past me and I screamed, “Daddy, watch out!” But the preacher was still confused. He just stood there, and Winn-Dixie came barreling right toward him like he was a bowling ball and the preacher was the only pin left standing, and wham, they both fell to the ground. “Uh-oh,” I said. “Opal?” said the preacher. He was lying on his stomach, and Winn-Dixie was sitting on top of him, panting and whining. “Yes sir,” I said. “Opal,” the preacher said again. “Yes sir,” I said louder. “Do you know what a pathological fear is?” “No sir,” I told him. The preacher raised a hand. He rubbed his nose. “Well,” he said, after a minute, “it’s a fear that goes way beyond normal fears. It’s a fear you can’t be talked out of or reasoned out of.” Just then there was another crack of thunder and Winn-Dixie rose straight up in the air like somebody had poked him with something hot. When he hit the floor, he started running. He ran back to my bedroom, and I didn’t even try to catch him; I just got out of his way. The preacher lay there on the ground, rubbing his nose. Finally, he sat up. He said, “Opal, I believe Winn-Dixie has a pathological fear of thunderstorms.” And just when he finished his sentence, here came Winn-Dixie again, running to save his life. I got the preacher up off the floor and out of the way just in time. There didn’t seem to be a thing we could do for Winn-Dixie to make him feel better, so we just sat there and watched him run back and forth, all terrorized and panting. And every time there was another crack of thunder, Winn-Dixie acted all over again like it was surely the end of the world. “The storm won’t last long,” the preacher told me. “And when it’s over, the real Winn-Dixie will come back.

Then, WHAM! We’re called up. We cross the vac. We drop. It gets real. All the shit happens at once, in a bloody, grinding flash—and if you live through it, if you survive with enough soul left to even care, you spend the rest of your fucked-up life wondering whether you should have done it different, done it better, or not at all. All for glory and the Corps.

Take this, you scoundrel!” Porkins shouted, then WHAM, he punched the ravager in the face with his iron arm. To Dave’s amazement, the ravager went flying backward, its rider landing on the ground. “Wow,” said Alex. “That’s definitely going in the comic book,” said Carl.

Cluck Lee ran forward in a blur of amber and green. Enderbrine shot tentacle after tentacle out of his mouth, trying to grab him, but the amber chicken jumped and dodged out of the way of them, before jumping up and—WHAM—spinning kicking Enderbrine under the chin. “GYYAAAHHHH!!!!” Enderbrine screamed as he went flying up into the air. Cluck Lee jumped up, then—WHAM, WHAM, WHAM, WHAM—hit Enderbrine with a flurry of kicks while he was still in the air. DOOF! Enderbrine landed back on the ground, landing in a heap on the floor. Cluck Lee landed gracefully in front of him. “Bwark!” said the amber chicken. Spidroth heard more bwark-ing behind her and turned around to see that the amber chickens and the purple wolves had won their battle.