When To Use Single Air Quotes

Michael Pollan likens consumer choices to pulling single threads out of a garment. We pull a thread from the garment when we refuse to purchase eggs or meat from birds who were raised in confinement, whose beaks were clipped so they could never once taste their natural diet of worms and insects. We pull out a thread when we refuse to bring home a hormone-fattened turkey for Thanksgiving dinner. We pull a thread when we refuse to buy meat or dairy products from cows who were never allowed to chew grass, or breathe fresh air, or feel the warm sun on their backs. The more threads we pull, the more difficult it is for the industry to stay intact. You demand eggs and meat without hormones, and the industry will have to figure out how it can raise farm animals without them. Let the animals graze outside and it slows production. Eventually the whole thing will have to unravel. If the factory farm does indeed unravel - and it must - then there is hope that we can, gradually, reverse the environmental damage it has caused. Once the animal feed operations have gone and livestock are once again able to graze, there will be a massive reduction in the agricultural chemicals currently used to grow grain for animals. And eventually, the horrendous contamination caused by animal waste can be cleaned up. None of this will be easy. The hardest part of returning to a truly healthy environment may be changing the current totally unsustainable heavy-meat-eating culture of increasing numbers of people around the world. But we must try. We must make a start, one by one.

The moon is always jealous of the heat of the day, just as the sun always longs for something dark and deep. They could see how love might control you, from your head to your toes, not to mention every single part of you in between. A woman could want a man so much she might vomit in the kitchen sink or cry so fiercly blood would form in the corners of her eyes. She put her hand to her throat as though someone were strangling her, but really she was choking on all that love she thought she’d needed so badly. What had she thought, that love was a toy, something easy and sweet, just to play with? Real love was dangerous, it got you from inside and held on tight, and if you didn’t let go fast enough you might be willing to do anything for it’s sake. She refused to believe in superstition, she wouldn’t; yet it was claiming her. Some fates are guaranteed, no matter who tries to intervene. After all I’ve done for you is lodged somewhere in her brain, and far worse, it’s in her heart as well. She was bad luck, ill-fated and unfortunate as the plague. She is not worth his devotion. She wishes he would evaporate into thin air. Maybe then she wouldn’t have this feeling deep inside, a feeling she can deny all she wants, but that won’t stop it from being desire. Love is worth the sum of itself and nothing more. But that’s what happens when you’re a liar, especially when you’re telling the worst of these lies to yourself. He has stumbled into love, and now he’s stuck there. He’s fairly used to not getting what he wants, and he’s dealt with it, yet he can’t help but wonder if that’s only because he didn’t want anything so badly. It’s music, it’s a sound that is absurdly beautiful in his mouth, but she won’t pay attention. She knows from the time she spent on the back stairs of the aunts’ house that most things men say are lies. Don’t listen, she tells herself. None if it’s true and none of it matters, because he’s whispering that he’s been looking for her forever. She can’t believe it. She can’t listen to anything he tells her and she certainly can’t think, because if she did she might just think she’d better stop. What good would it do her to get involved with someone like him? She’d have to feel so much, and she’s not that kind. The greatest portion of grief is the one you dish out for yourself. She preferred cats to human beings and turned down every offer from the men who fell in love with her. They told her how sticks and stones could break bones, but taunting and name-calling were only for fools. — & now here she is, all used up. Although she’d never believe it, those lines in *’s face are the most beautiful part about her. They reveal what she’s gone through and what she’s survived and who exactly she is, deep inside. She’s gotten back some of what she’s lost. Attraction, she now understands, is a state of mind. If there’s one thing * is now certain of, it’s house you can amaze yourself by the things you’re willing to do. You really don’t know? That heart-attack thing you’ve been having? It’s love, that’s what it feels like. She knows now that when you don’t lose yourself in the bargain, you find you have double the love you started with, and that’s one recipe that can’t be tampered with. Always throw spilled salt over your left shoulder. Keep rosemary by your garden gate. Add pepper to your mashed potatoes. Plant roses and lavender, for luck. Fall in love whenever you can.

Walking causes a repetitive, spontaneous poetry to rise naturally to the lips, words as simple as the sound of footsteps on the road. There also seems to be an echo of walking in the practice of two choruses singing a psalm in alternate verses, each on a single note, a practice that makes it possible to chant and listen by turns. Its main effect is one of repetition and alternation that St Ambrose compared to the sound of the sea: when a gentle surf is breaking quietly on the shore the regularity of the sound doesn’t break the silence, but structures it and renders it audible. Psalmody in the same way, in the to-and-fro of alternating responses, produces (Ambrose said) a happy tranquillity in the soul. The echoing chants, the ebb and flow of waves recall the alternating movement of walking legs: not to shatter but to make the world’s presence palpable and keep time with it. And just as Claudel said that sound renders silence accessible and useful, it ought to be said that walking renders presence accessible and useful.

The hills below crouched on all fours under the weight of the rainforest where liana grew and soldier ants marched in formation. Straight ahead they marched, shamelessly single-minded, for soldier ants have no time for dreaming. Almost all of them are women and there is so much to do - the work is literally endless. So many to be born and fed, then found and buried. There is no time for dreaming. The life of their world requires organization so tight and sacrifice so complete there is little need for males and they are seldom produced. When they are needed, it is deliberately done by the queen who surmises, by some four-million-year-old magic she is heiress to, that it is time. So she urges a sperm from the private womb where they were placed when she had her one, first and last copulation. Once in life, this little Amazon trembled in the air waiting for a male to mount her. And when he did, when he joined a cloud of others one evening just before a summer storm, joined colonies from all over the world gathered fro the marriage flight, he knew at last what his wings were for. Frenzied, he flied into the humming cloud to fight gravity and time in order to do, just once, the single thing he was born for. Then he drops dead, having emptied his sperm into his lady-love. Sperm which she keeps in a special place to use at her own discretion when there is need for another dark and singing cloud of ant folk mating in the air. Once the lady has collected the sperm, she too falls to the ground, but unless she breaks her back or neck or is eaten by one of a thousand things, she staggers to her legs and looks for a stone to rub on, cracking and shedding the wings she will never need again. Then she begins her journey searching for a suitable place to build her kingdom. She crawls into the hollow of a tree, examines its walls and corners. She seals herself off from all society and eats her own wing muscles until she bears her eggs. When the first larvae appear, there is nothing to feed them, so she gives them their unhatched sisters until they are old enough and strong enough to hunt and bring their prey back to the kingdom. That is all. Bearing, hunting, eating, fighting, burying. No time for dreaming, although sometimes, late in life, somewhere between the thirtieth and fortieth generation she might get wind of a summer storm one day. The scent of it will invade her palace and she will recall the rush of wind on her belly - the stretch of fresh wings, the blinding anticipation and herself, there, airborne, suspended, open, trusting, frightened, determined, vulnerable - girlish, even, for and entire second and then another and another. She may lift her head then, and point her wands toward the place where the summer storm is entering her palace and in the weariness that ruling queens alone know, she may wonder whether his death was sudden. Or did he languish? And if so, if there was a bit of time left, did he think how mean the world was, or did he fill that space of time thinking of her? But soldier ants do not have time for dreaming. They are women and have much to do. Still it would be hard. So very hard to forget the man who fucked like a star.

He knew he needed to release her, but once he allowed his physical connection to drop away, he was uncertain if he’d ever have a chance to reconnect. Instinctively, he knew Azami was elusive, like water flowing through fingers, or the wind shifting in the trees. He needed a way to seal her to him. “How does one court a woman in Japan? Do I need your brothers’ permission?” She blinked again. Shocked. A hint of uncertainty crept into her eyes. She frowned, and he bent his head to swallow her protest before she could utter it. Her mouth trembled beneath his, and then she opened to him, like a flower, luring him deeper. Her arms slid around his neck, her body pressing tightly against his. He tightened his fingers in her hair. He was burning, through and through, from the inside out, a hot melting of bone and tissue. He hadn’t known he was lonely or even looking for something. He’d been complete. He loved his wife. He was a man with teammates he trusted implicitly. He lived in wild places of beauty he enjoyed. He hadn’t considered there would be a woman who could ever fit with him, who would ever turn his insides soft and his body hard. Feel the same way, Azami. He didn’t lift his mouth, kissing her again and again because one he’d made the mistake, he was addicted and what was the use fighting it? Not when it felt so damn right. Somewhere along the line, his kiss went from sheer aggression and command, to absolute tenderness. The emotion for her rose like a volcano, encompassing him entirely, drawn from some part of him he’d never known even existed. His mouth was gentle, his hands on her, possessive, yet just as gentle. Another claiming, this coming from that deep unknown well. Feel the same way, Azami, he whispered into her mind. An enticement. A need. He waited, something in him going still, waiting for her answer. Tell me how you’re feeling? She hadn’t pulled away. If anything, her arms had tightened around his neck. He shared every single breath she took, feeling the slight movement of her rib cage and breasts against him, the warm air they exchanged. Like I’m burning alive. Drowning. Like I never want this moment to end. He wasn’t a man to say flowery things to a woman, nor did he even think them, but he shared the honest truth with her. Like we belong. Once he let her go, the world would slip back into kilter. He wanted her to stay with him, to give him a chance with her. She didn’t hesitate, and he loved that about her as well. She gave herself in truth in the same way he did. I feel the same, but one of us has to be sane. She initiated the kiss when he pulled back slightly, chasing after him with her soft mouth, fingers digging tightly into the heavy muscle at his neck, sighing when his lips settled once more over hers. He took his time, kissing her thoroughly, again and again, all the while slipping deeper into her spell and hoping she was falling under his. Is this your idea of sanity? He’d make it his reality. He was falling further down the rabbit hole and he’d make her his sanity if she’d fall with him. Her soft laughter slipped inside his heart, winding there until there was no shaking her loose. Not really, but you have to be the strong one. He kissed her again. And again. Why is that? You started this.

So, once again, I'm practicing trying to follow my own admonitions, the lessons the Hell Room has taught me: to trust myself. Keep less, use more. Be imperfect. Doing these things feels like stepping off a cliff into thin air, but it's paid off before when, after ten years, I finally took the medication; when after eighteen years, I finally opened the Hell Room door in earnest and decided to tell the world my ugly secret; and when, every single time over the last year, I made a decision to keep (what if I'm a hoarder?) or a decision to discard (what if I'm filled with regret?). No decision that we make about anything in life is 100 percent safe, and I know now *that's* was kills me.

Zoe returned her attention to the map of southern Argentina on the computer. “What on earth could possibly be worth using that much nuclear power on? There’s nothing around there but mountains and sea.” “There’s guanacos,” Murray said helpfully. “What the heck’s a guanaco?” Zoe asked. “It’s a relative of the camel,” Murray explained. “It kind of looks like an anorexic llama. From what I understand, the pampas down there are full of them.” “And you think SPYDER wants to nuke them all?” Zoe said. “What good is a whole bunch of vaporized guanacos?” “Suppose they only nuked one,” Murray said ominously. “What if they focused all that nuclear energy on it? If a single irradiated iguana could turn into Godzilla, just imagine what a giant guanaco would look like. It’d be terrifying!” Zoe gave him a withering look. “The only terrifying thing about this plan is that you actually think it’s possible. Godzilla never existed!” “But maybe he could,” Murray countered. “Or worse . . . Guanacazilla!” He gave a roar that was probably supposed to be half llama, half monster, but it sounded more like an angry hamster. We all considered him for a moment. “Moving on,” Erica said. “Does anyone have a suggestion that isn’t completely idiotic?” “Ha ha,” Murray said petulantly. “You mock me now, but we’ll see who’s laughing when there’s a thirty-story guanaco running rampant through Buenos Aires.

But Avril had gotten former M.I.T. #1 Men's Singles Corbett Throp to drive Mario down to V.F. Rickey's Rickey's cerebral Student Union thing, where Thorp used his old student I.D. (thumb over expiration date) to get them past the Security lady at the Rectus Bulbi and down to the YYY studio's freezing pink, where the only person who didn't talk like an angry cartoon character, a severely carbuncular man at the engineer's board, would by way of comment point only at a tripartite onionskin screen that stood folded beneath a handless wall-clock, possibly signifying that no hiatus could be that long if the absent party hadn't taken her trusty screen. Mario hadn't had any idea M.P.'d used a screen, on-air. That's when he'd gotten agitated.

few years later, Demeter took a vacation to the beach. She was walking along, enjoying the solitude and the fresh sea air, when Poseidon happened to spot her. Being a sea god, he tended to notice pretty ladies walking along the beach. He appeared out of the waves in his best green robes, with his trident in his hand and a crown of seashells on his head. (He was sure that the crown made him look irresistible.) “Hey, girl,” he said, wiggling his eyebrows. “You must be the riptide, ’cause you sweep me off my feet.” He’d been practicing that pickup line for years. He was glad he finally got to use it. Demeter was not impressed. “Go away, Poseidon.” “Sometimes the sea goes away,” Poseidon agreed, “but it always comes back. What do you say you and me have a romantic dinner at my undersea palace?” Demeter made a mental note not to park her chariot so far away. She really could’ve used her two dragons for backup. She decided to change form and get away, but she knew better than to turn into a snake this time. I need something faster, she thought. Then she glanced down the beach and saw a herd of wild horses galloping through the surf. That’s perfect! Demeter thought. A horse! Instantly she became a white mare and raced down the beach. She joined the herd and blended in with the other horses. Her plan had serious flaws. First, Poseidon could also turn into a horse, and he did—a strong white stallion. He raced after her. Second, Poseidon had created horses. He knew all about them and could control them. Why would a sea god create a land animal like the horse? We’ll get to that later. Anyway, Poseidon reached the herd and started pushing his way through, looking for Demeter—or rather sniffing for her sweet, distinctive perfume. She was easy to find. Demeter’s seemingly perfect camouflage in the herd turned out to be a perfect trap. The other horses made way for Poseidon, but they hemmed in Demeter and wouldn’t let her move. She got so panicky, afraid of getting trampled, that she couldn’t even change shape into something else. Poseidon sidled up to her and whinnied something like Hey, beautiful. Galloping my way? Much to Demeter’s horror, Poseidon got a lot cuddlier than she wanted. These days, Poseidon would be arrested for that kind of behavior. I mean…assuming he wasn’t in horse form. I don’t think you can arrest a horse. Anyway, back in those days, the world was a rougher, ruder place. Demeter couldn’t exactly report Poseidon to King Zeus, because Zeus was just as bad. Months later, a very embarrassed and angry Demeter gave birth to twins. The weirdest thing? One of the babies was a goddess; the other one was a stallion. I’m not going to even try to figure that out. The baby girl was named Despoine, but you don’t hear much about her in the myths. When she grew up, her job was looking after Demeter’s temple, like the high priestess of corn magic or something. Her baby brother, the stallion, was named Arion. He grew up to be a super-fast immortal steed who helped out Hercules and some other heroes, too. He was a pretty awesome horse, though I’m not sure that Demeter was real proud of having a son who needed new horseshoes every few months and was constantly nuzzling her for apples. At this point, you’d think Demeter would have sworn off those gross, disgusting men forever and joined Hestia in the Permanently Single Club. Strangely, a couple of months later, she fell in love with a human prince named Iasion (pronounced EYE-son, I think). Just shows you how far humans had come since Prometheus gave them fire. Now they could speak and write. They could brush their teeth and comb their hair. They wore clothes and occasionally took baths. Some of them were even handsome enough to flirt with goddesses.

The Dying Man" in memoriam W.B. Yeats 1. His words I heard a dying man Say to his gathered kin, “My soul’s hung out to dry, Like a fresh salted skin; I doubt I’ll use it again. “What’s done is yet to come; The flesh deserts the bone, But a kiss widens the rose I know, as the dying know Eternity is Now. “A man sees, as he dies, Death’s possibilities; My heart sways with the world. I am that final thing, A man learning to sing. 2. What Now? Caught in the dying light, I thought myself reborn. My hand turn into hooves. I wear the leaden weight Of what I did not do. Places great with their dead, The mire, the sodden wood, Remind me to stay alive. I am the clumsy man The instant ages on. I burned the flesh away, In love, in lively May. I turn my look upon Another shape than hers Now, as the casement blurs. In the worst night of my will, I dared to question all, And would the same again. What’s beating at the gate? Who’s come can wait. 3. The Wall A ghost comes out of the unconscious mind To grope my sill: It moans to be reborn! The figure at my back is not my friend; The hand upon my shoulder turns to horn. I found my father when I did my work, Only to lose myself in this small dark. Though it reject dry borders of the seen, What sensual eye can keep and image pure, Leaning across a sill to greet the dawn? A slow growth is a hard thing to endure. When figures our of obscure shadow rave, All sensual love’s but dancing on a grave. The wall has entered: I must love the wall, A madman staring at perpetual night, A spirit raging at the visible. I breathe alone until my dark is bright. Dawn’s where the white is. Who would know the dawn When there’s a dazzling dark behind the sun. 4. The Exulting Once I delighted in a single tree; The loose air sent me running like a child– I love the world; I want more than the world, Or after image of the inner eye. Flesh cries to flesh, and bone cries out to bone; I die into this life, alone yet not alone. Was it a god his suffering renewed?– I saw my father shrinking in his skin; He turned his face: there was another man, Walking the edge, loquacious, unafraid. He quivered like a bird in birdless air, Yet dared to fix his vision anywhere. Fish feed on fish, according to their need: My enemies renew me, and my blood Beats slower in my careless solitude. I bare a wound, and dare myself to bleed. I think a bird, and it begins to fly. By dying daily, I have come to be. All exultation is a dangerous thing. I see you, love, I see you in a dream; I hear a noise of bees, a trellis hum, And that slow humming rises into song. A breath is but a breath: I have the earth; I shall undo all dying with my death. 5. They Sing, They Sing All women loved dance in a dying light– The moon’s my mother: how I love the moon! Out of her place she comes, a dolphin one, Then settles back to shade and the long night. A beast cries out as if its flesh were torn, And that cry takes me back where I was born. Who thought love but a motion in the mind? Am I but nothing, leaning towards a thing? I scare myself with sighing, or I’ll sing; Descend O gentlest light, descend, descend. I sweet field far ahead, I hear your birds, They sing, they sing, but still in minor thirds. I’ve the lark’s word for it, who sings alone: What’s seen recededs; Forever’s what we know!– Eternity defined, and strewn with straw, The fury of the slug beneath the stone. The vision moves, and yet remains the same. In heaven’s praise, I dread the thing I am. The edges of the summit still appall When we brood on the dead or the beloved; Nor can imagination do it all In this last place of light: he dares to live Who stops being a bird, yet beats his wings Against the immense immeasurable emptiness of things.

They stuffed the air between my clothes and me with ice-cubes from my neck to my ankles, and whenever the ice melted, they put in new, hard ice cubes. Moreover, every once in a while, one of the guards smashed me, most of the time in the face. The ice served both for the pain and for wiping out the bruises I had from that afternoon. Everything seemed to be perfectly prepared. People from cold regions might not understand the extent of the pain when ice-cubes get stuck on your body. Historically, kings during medieval and pre-medieval times used this method to let the victim slowly die. The other method, of hitting the victim while blindfolded in inconsistent intervals, was used by the Nazis during World War II. There is nothing more terrorizing than making somebody expect a smash every single heartbeat.

This skirmish with Beaverbrook was mostly stage combat. Having been friends for so long, they knew well how to jolt each other’s composure, and when to stop. This was one reason Churchill liked having Beaverbrook in his government and found such value in his near-daily presence. Beaverbrook was never predictable. Exasperating, yes, but always a source of energy and cold-eyed clarity, with a mind like an electric storm. Both men took a certain delight in dictating letters to each other. To both it was like acting—Churchill strutting about in his gold-dragon nightclothes and jabbing the air with a dead cigar, savoring the sound and feel of words; Beaverbrook like a knife thrower at a carnival, hurling whatever cutlery came to hand. The physical character of the resulting letters revealed the men’s contrapuntal natures. Where Churchill’s paragraphs were long and precisely worded, full of complex grammatical structures and historical allusions (in one note to Beaverbrook he used the word “ichthyosaurus”), each of Beaverbrook’s paragraphs was a single, brief knife thrust serrated with short, crisp words, not so much savored as sputtered.

I lift the lid of the chest. Inside, the air is musty and stale, held hostage for years in its three-foot-by-four-foot tomb. I lean in to survey the contents cautiously, then pull out a stack of old photos tied with twine. On top is a photo of a couple on their wedding day. She's a young bride, wearing one of those 1950's netted veils. He looks older, distinguished- sort of like Cary Grant or Gregory Peck in the old black-and-white movies I used to watch with my grandmother. I set the stack down and turn back to the chest, where I find a notebook, filled with handwritten recipes. The page for Cinnamon Rolls is labeled "Dex's Favorite." 'Dex.' I wonder if he's the man in the photo. There are two ticket stubs from 1959, one to a Frank Sinatra concert, another to the movie 'An Affair to Remember.' A single shriveled rosebud rests on a white handkerchief. A corsage? When I lift it into my hand, it disintegrates; the petals crinkle into tiny pieces that fall onto the living room carpet. At the bottom of the chest is what looks like a wedding dress. It's yellowed and moth-eaten, but I imagine it was once stark white and beautiful. As I lift it, I can hear the lace swishing as if to say, "Ahh." Whoever wore it was very petite. The waist circumference is tiny. A pair of long white gloves falls to the floor. They must have been tucked inside the dress. I refold the finery and set the ensemble back inside. Whose things are these? And why have they been left here? I thumb through the recipe book. All cookies, cakes, desserts. She must have loved to bake. I tuck the book back inside the chest, along with the photographs after I've retied the twine, which is when I notice a book tucked into the corner. It's an old paperback copy of Ernest Hemingway's 'The Sun Also Rises.' I've read a little of Hemingway over the years- 'A Moveable Feast' and some of his later work- but not this one. I flip through the book and notice that one page is dog-eared. I open to it and see a line that has been underscored. "You can't get away from yourself by moving from one place to another." I look out to the lake, letting the words sink in. 'Is that what I'm trying to do? Get away from myself?' I stare at the line in the book again and wonder if it resonated with the woman who underlined it so many years ago. Did she have her own secret pain? 'Was she trying to escape it just like me?

We walk around inside that house like everything is okay, but it’s not, Quinn. We’ve been broken for years and I have no idea how to fix us. I find solutions. It’s what I do. It’s what I’m good at. But I have no idea how to solve me and you. Every day I come home, hoping things will be better. But you can’t even stand to be in the same room with me. You hate it when I touch you. You hate it when I talk to you. I pretend not to notice the things you don’t want me to notice because I don’t want you to hurt more than you already do.” He releases a rush of air. “I am not blaming you for what I did. It’s my fault. I did that. I fucked up. But I didn’t fuck up because I was attracted to her. I fucked up because I miss you. Every day, I miss you. When I’m at work, I miss you. When I’m home, I miss you. When you’re next to me in bed, I miss you. When I’m inside you, I miss you.” Graham presses his mouth to mine. I can taste his tears. Or maybe they’re my tears. He pulls back and presses his forehead to mine. “I miss you, Quinn. So much. You’re right here, but you aren’t. I don’t know where you went or when you left, but I have no idea how to bring you back. I am so alone. We live together. We eat together. We sleep together. But I have never felt more alone in my entire life.” Graham releases me and falls back against his seat. He rests his elbow against the window, covering his face as he tries to compose himself. He’s more broken than I’ve ever seen him in all the years I’ve known him. And I’m the one slowly tearing him down. I’m making him unrecognizable. I’ve strung him along by allowing him to believe there’s hope that I’ll eventually change. That I’ll miraculously turn back into the woman he fell in love with. But I can’t change. We are who our circumstances turn us into. “Graham.” I wipe at my face with my shirt. He’s quiet, but he eventually looks at me with his sad, heartbroken eyes. “I haven’t gone anywhere. I’ve been here this whole time. But you can’t see me because you’re still searching for someone I used to be. I’m sorry I’m no longer who I was back then. Maybe I’ll get better. Maybe I won’t. But a good husband loves his wife through the good and the bad times. A good husband stands at his wife’s side through sickness and health, Graham. A good husband- a husband who truly loves his wife - wouldn’t cheat on her and then blame his infidelity on the fact that he’s lonely.” Graham’s expression doesn’t change. He’s as still as a statue. The only thing that moves is his jaw as he works it back and forth. And then his eyes narrow and he tilts his head. “You don’t think I love you, Quinn?” “I know you used to. But I don’t think you love the person I’ve become.” Graham sits up straight. He leans forward, looking me hard in the eye. His words are clipped as he speaks. “I have loved you every single second of every day since the moment I laid eyes on you. I love you more now than I did the day I married you. I love you, Quinn. I fucking love you!” He opens his car door, gets out and then slams it shut with all his strength. The whole car shakes. He walks toward the house, but before he makes it to the front door, he spins around and points at me angrily. “I love you, Quinn!” He’s shouting the words. He’s angry. So angry. He walks toward his car and kicks at the front bumper with his bare foot. He kicks and he kicks and he kicks and then pauses to scream it at me again. “I love you!” He slams his fist against the top of his car, over and over, until he finally collapses against the hood, his head buried in his arms. He remains in this position for an entire minute, the only thing moving is the subtle shaking of his shoulders. I don’t move. I don’t even think I breathe. Graham finally pushes off the hood and uses his shirt to wipe at his eyes. He looks at me, completely defeated. “I love you,” he says quietly, shaking his head. “I always have. No matter how much you wish I didn’t.

And you're thinking I just tossed out some casual phrase that you've heard from dozens of guys? Or maybe one in particular,who mattered enough to turn you into a cynic?" At the intensity of his tone she looked up. "Yeah.Something like that.After all, McCord,your reputation precedes you. You're not exactly shy with women. I'm sure you've used plenty of lines like that to get what you want." His eyes,steady on hers,were hot and fierce. His voice was equally fierce. "I'll admit that when I first saw you, my initial reaction was purely physical. A healthy combination of testosterone and lust.What guy could look at you and not feel what I felt? You're beautiful, and bright and independent.And did I mention beautiful?" That brought a smile to her eyes. "But the more I got to know you,the more I realized you weren't just a pretty package.I started learning that you were someone special.Someone I wanted to treat very carefully." "And now?" "I'm still battling lust." There was that grin,sending an arrow straight through her heart. "But there's more here.Much more." He stared at her mouth with naked hunger. "I've waited a long time for this,but now I'm going to have to kiss you.And when I do,I can't promise to stop." She stood very still,heart pounding. "How do you know I'll ask you to?" "Careful.Because unless you tell me to stop,you have to know where this is heading..." In reply she stood on tiptoe to brush her mouth to his,stopping his words. Stopping his heart. He drew in a deep breath and drew her a little away to stare into her eyes. "I hope you meant that." "With all my heart." "Thank God." He dragged her against him and covered her lips with his.Inside her mouth he whispered, "Because, baby,I mean this." She'd waited so long.So long.And it was worth all the time she'd spent waiting and wondering.Here was a man who knew how to kiss a woman and make her feel like the only one in the universe. This kiss was so hot,so hungry, she felt the rush of desire from the top of her head all the way to her toes.And still it spun on and on until she became lost in it. He changed the angle of the kiss and took it deeper until Marilee could feel her flesh heating, her bones melting like hot wax. She wanted to be sensible,to move slowly, but her mind refused to cooperate. With a single kiss her brain had been wiped clear of every thought but one.She wanted this man.Wanted him now.Desperately. When at last they came up for air, she put a hand to his chest. "I need a minute to catch my breath." "Okay." A second later he dragged her close. "Time's up." Her laughter turned into a sigh as he ran nibbling kisses down her throat until the blood was drumming in her temples.

Can't you just let it go? Move on?" His face darkened. His eyes glared in response and he was silent a long time while his jaw worked over a toothpick. She'd used the same line that the prophet and his representatives had been using for years. Even if these things did happen, there is no point in being bitter. You should forgive and forget and let bygones be bygones. Kind of galling, considering the insistence upon forgiveness was being made by the people who had done the hurting and done nothing to make up for it. But then, that was the standard 'blame the victim' abuser mentally, and to be expected. Gideon seemed to work through this slap in the face and let it slide. He said, "For a while I thought maybe, you know, if I could talk to the people responsible. If I could show them how difficult life has been because of them, that maybe they would care. I don't know. I thought maybe if they apologized, it would be so much easier to forget this shit. You know? To do what they say and 'let it go'. But nobody will take any personal responsibility. My own parents have nothing to offer but a bunch of whiny excuses. They try to convince me that my life wasn't as bad as I remember it." "Fuck that," he said, "They weren't even there. They don't even know what went on with me. I just..." He paused and pulled his fingers through his hair. "Christ," he said. He paused again, eyes to the sky, and then back to her. "Even the people who never personally raised a hand against me still propped up the regime that made it happen. They stood by and allowed it. Played a part. All of them. Every single one was a participant. Either directly or by looking away. Institutionally, doctrinally, they abused us. Sent us into the streets to beg, denied us an education, had us beaten, starved, exorcised, and separated from our parents. They broke up our families, gave our bodies to perverts, and stole our future. And then they turn around and say we're supposed to just forget it happened and move on from it. If instead we bring up the past, then they'll call us liars. Say we're exaggerating or making it up completely. Why the hell would be make any of this shit up? What's the point in that? To make our lives seem worse than they were? Not that I would, but do you have any idea how much exaggeration it would take for the average person to even begin to grasp how fucking miserable it was? And then, if they ever do admit to any of it, they say that 'mistakes were made'. " "Mistakes." he said. He was leaning forward again, punctuating the air with his finger. "Michael, they commit crimes against children. You know, those things people in society go to jail for when they're caught. And then to the public they do what they always do. Deny. Deny. Deny. And we're left more raped than ever. Victimized first by what they did, and again by their refusal to admit that it happened. They paint us as bitter apostates and liars to a world that not only doesn't give a shit, but also couldn't possibly understand even if it did." "I do," Munroe said. And Gideon stopped.

On the other hand, everyday language would soon prove inadequate for designating all the olfactory notions that he had accumulated within himself. Soon he was no longer smelling mere wood, but kinds of wood: maple-wood, oak-wood, pine-wood, elm-wood, pear-wood, old, young, rotting, mouldering, mossy wood, down to single logs, chips and splinters – and could clearly differentiate them as objects in a way that other people could not have done by sight. It was the same with other things. For instance, the white drink that Madame Gaillard served her wards each day, why should it be designated uniformly as milk, when to Grenouille’s senses it smelled and tasted completely different every morning depending on how warm it was, which cow it had come from, what that cow had been eating, how much cream had been left in it and so on … Or why should smoke possess only the name ‘smoke’, when from minute to minute, second to second, the amalgam of hundreds of odours mixed iridescently into ever new and changing unities as the smoke rose from the fire … or why should earth, landscape, air – each filled at every step and every breath with yet another odour and thus animated with another identity – still be designated by just those three coarse words. All these grotesque incongruities between the richness of the world perceivable by smell and the poverty of language were enough for the lad Grenouille to doubt that language made any sense at all; and he grew accustomed to using such words only when his contact with others made it absolutely necessary.

His tears couldn’t change that stony outcropping in his character any more than a single summer cloudburst can change the shape of rock. There were good uses for such hardness—she knew that, had known it as a woman raising a boy on her own in a city that cared little for mothers and less for their children—but Larry hadn’t found any yet. He was just what she had said he was: the same old Larry. He would go along, not thinking, getting people—including himself—into jams, and when the jams got bad enough, he would call upon that hard streak to extricate himself. As for the others? He would leave them to sink or swim on their own. Rock was tough, and there was toughness in his character, but he still used it destructively. She could see it in his eyes, read it in every line of his posture … even in the way he bobbed his cancer-stick to make those little rings in the air. He had never sharpened that hard piece of him into a blade to cut people with, and that was something, but when he needed it, he was still calling on it as a child did—as a bludgeon to beat his way out of traps he had dug for himself. Once, she had told herself Larry would change. She had; he would. But this was no boy in front of her; this was a grown-up man, and she feared that his days of change—the deep and fundamental sort her minister called a change of soul rather than one of heart—were behind him. There was something in Larry that gave you the bitter zing of hearing chalk screech on a blackboard. Deep inside, looking out, was only Larry. He was the only one allowed inside his heart. But she loved him.

This could get a little hairy,” I tell them in interruption. Seriously, I don’t want to know this secret. I’ve got too much other shit going on. I grimace at the very questionable intestines that belong to some fabled creature that surely can’t exist under the radar if all that fit inside it. “If you’re a respawner instead of an unkillable being, get out of the kitchen and at least a mile from the house.” Mom assured me there’s a five mile seclusion radius. Damien starts speaking to me, almost as though he’s too tired to deal with my tinkering right now. “Violet, that potion has to be fresh. There’s no need-" ... There’s a loud, bubbling, sizzling noise that cracks through the air, and I drop to the floor, as a pulse shoots from the pot. Damien yelps, as he and Emit are thrown into one wall, and Mom curses seconds before she and Arion are launched almost into each other, hitting opposing walls instead, when they manage to twist in the air to avoid touching. Everyone crashes to the ground at almost the same time. Groans and grunts and coughs of pain all ring out in annoyed unison. “I warned you,” I call out, even as most of them narrow their eyes in my direction. Damien shoots me a look of exasperation, and I shrug a shoulder. “She did warn us,” Mom grumbles as she remains lying on the floor, while everyone else pushes to their feet. “No one fucks up a potion better than I do. If I fuck it up enough, less power will be needed to raise them,” I go on, smiling over at Emit…who is just staring at me like he’s confused. “But it’s the exact right ingredients,” he says warily, as he stands. “She’s apples and oranges. You can’t compare her to anyone else using those ingredients for that reason,” Mom says dismissively, as I gesture to Vance. “Take him with you; I’m going to be a while. That was just the first volatile ingredient. I don’t think you want to be here for the yacktite—” “Ylacklatite,” they all correct in unison. “You don’t want to be here for those gross, possibly toxic, hard-to-say, fabled-creature intestines. It’s going to probably get crazy up in here,” I say as I twirl my finger around, staying on the floor for a minute longer. Sometimes there’s an echo. “Raise your heartbeat. You’re not taking this seriously enough,” Mom scolds. “What are you doing letting your heartbeat drop so much?” “You really should go. It gets unpredictable when—” The echo pulse I worried would come knocks Arion, Emit, and Damien to the ceiling this time, and I cringe when I hear things crack. When they drop, Arion and Emit land in a crouch, and Damien lands hard on his back, cursing the pot on the stove like it’s singled him out and has it in for sexual deviants. Arion’s lips twitch as he stares over at me, likely thinking what sort of punch a pencil could pack with this concoction. But I’ll be damned if Shera steals any of this juice for his freaky pencils. “Do you rip up those dolls to use them as a timer?” the vampire asks, as he stays on the floor, causing Mom to sneer in his direction. Another pulse cracks some glass, but everyone is under the reach of it now. Damien just shakes his head. “You have drawers full of toxic pencils I don’t even want to know the purpose of,” I tell him dryly. “You don’t get to judge.” His grin grows like he’s pleased with something. I think Mom is seconds away from a brain aneurism

Do you remember the time we tied a lasso to a tree limb and decided to swing across the creek like Tarzan?" Wyatt tipped up his frosty bottle and took a long pull. "Yeah." Zane was already laughing. "As usual,you two decided that I'd be the one to try it out first.That way,if it broke,I'd be the one tossed into the creek." "It stands to reason." Jesse chuckled. "You were the youngest. That's just the price you had to pay to hang out with us." "And," Wyatt added, "you were always willing to go along with whatever we decided." Zane shook his head. "Not when I used it to fly across the creek." "And not when I followed him," Wyatt said with a laugh. "But Jesse, assured that it was safe,grabbed hold and was flying through the air when the branch snapped." Amy looked over at her husband. "You landed in the creek?" "Yeah? On the day after one of our biggest storms,with the water spilling over its banks and rushing so fast it carried me downstream half a mile or more." She put a hand to her mouth to cover her shock and saw Cora do the same. Wyatt laughed. "He was lucky Zane and I had our horses tethered nearby.We chased along the banks of the creek until we could get far enough ahead to toss him a tree branch to catch. By the time we hauled him out,he looked like a drowned rat and was spitting mad." "I had a right to be.I swallowed half the creek." Zane laughed. "But think how lucky we were that it happened to you instead of me. At least you could swim." Marilee's eyes rounded. "They had you test the rope when they knew you couldn't swim?" Wyatt was laughing even harder. "We figured it was one way for him to learn." "How old were you?" They thought a minute before Wyatt answered. "I was eight,so that would make Jesse ten and Zane seven." "You could have all drowned." "Yeah.Looking back,we were lucky to have surrived so many foolish adventures. But," Wyatt added, "I wouldn't have missed a single one of them." of them

Well, it was a kind of back-to-front program. It’s funny how many of the best ideas are just an old idea back-to-front. You see there have already been several programs written that help you to arrive at decisions by properly ordering and analysing all the relevant facts so that they then point naturally towards the right decision. The drawback with these is that the decision which all the properly ordered and analysed facts point to is not necessarily the one you want.’ ‘Yeeeess...’ said Reg’s voice from the kitchen. ‘Well, Gordon’s great insight was to design a program which allowed you to specify in advance what decision you wished it to reach, and only then to give it all the facts. The program’s task, which it was able to accomplish with consummate ease, was simply to construct a plausible series of logical-sounding steps to connect the premises with the conclusion. ‘And I have to say that it worked brilliantly. Gordon was able to buy himself a Porsche almost immediately despite being completely broke and a hopeless driver. Even his bank manager was unable to find fault with his reasoning. Even when Gordon wrote it off three weeks later.’ ‘Heavens. And did the program sell very well?’ ‘No. We never sold a single copy.’ ‘You astonish me. It sounds like a real winner to me.’ ‘It was,’ said Richard hesitantly. ‘The entire project was bought up, lock, stock and barrel, by the Pentagon. The deal put WayForward on a very sound financial foundation. Its moral foundation, on the other hand, is not something I would want to trust my weight to. I’ve recently been analysing a lot of the arguments put forward in favour of the Star Wars project, and if you know what you’re looking for, the pattern of the algorithms is very clear. ‘So much so, in fact, that looking at Pentagon policies over the last couple of years I think I can be fairly sure that the US Navy is using version 2.00 of the program, while the Air Force for some reason only has the beta-test version of 1.5. Odd, that.

NOTE: Practice your most effective relaxation techniques before you begin these exercises (refer to Chapter 6 if necessary). People are better able to concentrate when they are relaxed. Listening -Pay attention to the sounds coming from outside: from the street, from above in the air, from as far away as possible. Then focus on one sound only. -Pay attention to the sounds coming from a nearby room—the kitchen, living room, etc. Identify each one, then focus on a single sound. -Pay attention to the sounds coming from the room you are in: the windows, the electrical appliances. Then focus on one sound only. -Listen to your breathing. -Hear a short tune and attempt to re-create it. -Listen to a sound, such as a ringing doorbell, a knock on the door, a telephone ringing, or a siren. How does it make you feel? -Listen to a voice on the telephone. Really focus on it. -Listen to the voices of family members, colleagues, or fellow students, paying close attention to their intonation, pacing, and accent. What mood are they conveying? Looking -Look around the room and differentiate colors or patterns, such as straight lines, circles, and squares. -Look at the architecture of the room. Now close your eyes. Can you describe it? Could you draw it? -Look at one object in the room: chair, desk, chest of drawers, whatever. Close your eyes and try to picture the shape, the material, and the colors. -Notice any changes in your environment at home, at school, or in your workplace. -Look at magazine photos and try to guess what emotions the subjects’ expressions show. -Observe the effect of light around you. How does it change shapes? Expressions? Moods? Touching -When shaking a person’s hand, notice the temperature of the hand. Then notice the temperature of your own hand. -Hold an object in your hands, such as a cup of coffee, a brick, a tennis ball, or anything else that is available. Then put it down. Close your eyes and remember the shape, size, and texture of the object. -Feel different objects and then, with your eyes closed, touch them again. Be aware of how the sensations change. -Explore different textures and surfaces with your eyes first open and then closed. Smelling and Tasting -Be aware of the smells around you; come up with words to describe them. -Try to remember the taste of a special meal that you enjoyed in the past. Use words to describe the flavors—not just the names of the dishes. -Search your memory for important smells or tastes. -Think of places with a strong tie to smell. These sensory exercises are an excellent way to boost your awareness and increase your ability to concentrate. What is learned in the fullest way—using all five senses—is unlikely to be forgotten. As you learn concentration, you will find that you are able to be more in tune with what is going on around you in a social situation, which in turn allows you to interact more fully.

Privacy and pollution are similar problems. Both cause harm that is invisible and pervasive. Both result from exploitation of a resource--whether it is land, water, or information. Both suffer from difficult attribution. It is not easy to identify a single pollutant or a single piece of data that caused harm. Rather, the harm often comes from an accumulation of pollutants, or an assemblage of data. And the harm of both pollution and privacy is collective. No one person bears the burden of all pollution; all of society suffers when the air is dirty and the water undrinkable. Similarly, we all suffer when we live in fear that our data will be used against us by companies trying to exploit us or police officers sweeping us into a lineup. (212-213)

Somewhere Else Discouraging, or training a cat away from a certain area is impossible to achieve as a human. This is because it has to happen within two seconds with consistent intensity every single time they come within the forbidden perimeter If you’re at work, you can’t spray the cat with water when she jumps on the counter. Do yourself a favor and get a remote training device! You won’t need it for more than a few weeks. For instance, one such device is a compressed air canister with an electric eye. The cat jumps up on the counter, the can sprays a spurt of air. The cat jumps down. She won’t have to do this too many days in a row before she just decides that the counter is unfriendly. That being said, don’t forget my rule of thumb when discouraging a cat from doing something: Behind every “No” there needs to be a “Yes!” If your cats are insistent about the counter, use your cat mojo and figure out why it’s so important. Then, give them a perch right nearby that’s acceptable to you and achieves the important objective for them.

IT WAS FULL DARK OUT NOW AND THE FIRST RUSH OF THE FREE night air roared into my lungs and out through my veins, calling my name with a thundering whisper of welcome and urging me on into the purring darkness, and we hurried to the car to ride away to happiness. But as we opened the car door and put one foot in, some small acid niggle twitched at our coattails and we paused; something was not right, and the frigid glee of our purpose slid off our back and onto the pavement like old snakeskin. Something was not right. I looked around me in the hot and humid Miami night. The neighborhood was just as it had always been; no sudden threat had sprung from the row of one-story houses with their toy-littered yards. There was nothing moving on our street, no one lurking in the shadows of the hedge, no rogue helicopter swooping down to strafe me—nothing. But still I heard that nagging trill of doubt. I took in a slow lungful of air through my nose. There was nothing to smell beyond the mingled odors of cooking, the tang of distant rainfall, the whiff of rotting vegetation that always lurked in the South Florida night. So what was wrong? What had set the tinny little alarm bells to clattering when I was finally out the door and free? I saw nothing, heard nothing, smelled nothing, felt nothing—but I had learned to trust the pesky whisper of warning, and I stood there unmoving, unbreathing, straining for an answer. And then a low row of dark clouds rumbled open overhead and revealed a small slice of silvery moon—a tiny, inadequate moon, a moon of no consequence at all, and we breathed out all the doubt. Of course—we were used to riding out into the wicked gleam of a full and bloated moon, slicing and slashing to the open-throated sound track of a big round choir in the sky. There was no such beacon overhead tonight, and it didn’t seem right somehow to gallop off into glee without it. But tonight was a special session, an impromptu raid into a mostly moonless evening, and in any case it must be done, would be done—but done as a solo cantata this time, a cascade of single notes without a backup singer. This small and wimpish quarter-moon was far too young to warble, but we could do very well without it, just this once. And

Messerschmitt Me 264 with steam turbine In August 1944, the firm of Osermaschinen G.m.b.H. founded by Professor Losel was commissioned to carry out the design and development of a steam turbine power unit for aircraft. The design called for 6000hp at 6000rpm with a weight/power ratio of 0.7kg/hp and a consumption of 190 grams/hp/hour. A Me 264 airframe was to have been placed at the disposal of the firm, but it was destroyed in an air raid. Two forms of propeller were envisaged, one of 17.5ft diameter and revolving at 400-500rpm and the other 6.5ft in diameter revolving at 600rpm. The whole system consisted of four boilers (capillary tube boilers of special design) boiler feed water pump and auxiliary turbine, main turbine, combustion air draught fan, condenser, controls and auxiliaries. At the time of the German collapse many components of the system had been produced, including the turbine blades, and auxiliaries such as the combustion air draught fan and condenser pump were ready for use. A start had been made with the assembly of the auxiliary and main turbine and one boiler had been manufactured in its entirety. The first system was designed to use 65% solid fuel (pulverised coal) and 35% liquid fuel (petrol) but it was intended to use liquid fuel only when it became available in quantity. The advantages claimed for the steam-turbine system are: 1)       Constant power at varying heights. 2)     Capacity for 100% overloading, even for long periods. 3)      Full steam output attained in 5-10 seconds. 4)     The system is not sensitive to low temperatures. 5)     Long life and simple servicing. 6)      Simple and rapid control. 7)      The system lends itself to incorporation in an airframe, since it can be broken down into separate components. The four main boilers are 3ft in diameter and 4ft high. The main turbine is 2ft in diameter and 6ft in length.     Messerschmitt Me 265     Messerschmitt Me 309 fighter A single-seat

the bathroom down the hall, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it, not knowing whom she’d run into and when. Indoor plumbing seemed unnecessary anyway. Getting water from the well and using the outdoor toilet was easy enough. But that shower, now that was a thing of beauty! She took the brush from the cabinet and let loose her single braid, as thick and long as the grasses that stood by the river back home. She shook her head so that her black hair fell loose, then brushed it, slowly and carefully, treating it as if every inch held a story. One stroke and then another, until it was smooth and silky, like the pajamas she slept in. They were different from the ones she wore at home, which she had made for herself. The stitching was too regular, too perfect to have been made by a young woman’s hand. Obviously, they were made by machine, like everything in Kabul. When Sunny had presented the room to her, she had been particularly proud of the full-length mirror that was framed in a shiny dark wood and sat on its own four legs. But Yazmina thought of it as vanity and had turned it away once Sunny had departed. Today, though, she turned it to face her. She put her hands on her stomach, where the life inside was growing with each new day, and looked at herself. She pulled the sleeping gown over her head, removed her undergarments, and there was her body, which she was seeing naked, in full, for the first time in her life. She was slim, her legs long and lean, her right leg still red and scraped from knee to thigh where she had fallen on the pebbled road when she was pushed out of the car. Her arms were slender but muscled from daily chores, still bruised by the rough grip of strong hands. She looked at her breasts, which were larger than usual because of her condition, but nothing like the long, low ones of Halajan, the old busybody who lived next door to the café and had an opinion about everything. Yazmina thought that woman had been sent by God himself to test her patience. No, Yazmina’s breasts were still “as glowing and round as the midnight moon,” as Najam used to tell her. She saddened at the memory of her husband’s face, his kisses and his touch. She would never feel such sweetness again. But she was with his baby. She turned to the side to look at her belly and stroked it with her two hands. She took a deep breath as if the air would give her all she and her baby needed to thrive. This will be my baby, she thought, my Najam, or if a girl, Inshallah, God willing, Najama (for Yazmina was convinced it was a girl, perhaps because it was Najam’s wish to have many children—a son or two, of course, but also a daughter who had the same light in her eyes as Yazmina). Not only would the baby be named after her father, but she would be a star lighting up the night sky, as the name meant. Najam’s seed was part of her, and she would cherish it and die trying to protect it.

Who are they?’ asked K. ‘Klamm’s servants,’ said Frieda. ‘He always brings them with him, and their presence upsets me. I hardly know what I was discussing with you just now, Mr Land Surveyor, and if there was anything wrong in it you must forgive me. I blame it on the company here, they are the most contemptible and repulsive people I know, and here am I, obliged to fill up their beer glasses. How often I’ve asked Klamm to leave them behind! I have to put up with other gentlemen’s servants too—he might think of me for once, but whatever I say it’s no use, an hour before he arrives they come barging in like cattle into the cowshed. And now they really must go to the stables where they belong. If you weren’t here I’d open that door and Klamm himself would have to drive them out.’ ‘Doesn’t he hear them, then?’ asked K. ‘No,’ said Frieda. ‘He’s asleep.’ ‘What!’ cried K. ‘Asleep? When I looked into the room he was awake and sitting at the desk.’ ‘He’s still sitting there like that,’ said Frieda. ‘He was already asleep when you saw him—would I have let you look in otherwise? That’s the position he sleeps in, the gentlemen sleep a great deal, it’s hard to understand. Then again, if he didn’t sleep so much, how could he stand those men? Well, I’ll have to chase them out myself.’ And picking up a whip from the corner, she took a single awkward leap high into the air, rather like a lamb gambolling, and made for the dancers. At first they turned to her as if she were a new dancer joining them, and indeed, for a moment it looked as if Frieda would drop the whip, but then she raised it again. ‘In the name of Klamm,’ she cried, ‘out into the stables, all of you, out into the stables.’ Now they saw that she was serious, and in a kind of terror that K. couldn’t understand, they began crowding away to the back of the room. A door was pushed open by the first to get there, night air blew in, and they all disappeared with Frieda, who was obviously driving them across the yard to the stables.

Alarmed at a high incidence of crashes during routine flight training in the 1940s, U.S. Air Force officials looked for evidence of mechanical flaws in the planes or human error perhaps inadvertently introduced by their curriculum, but the cause of the crashes remained mysterious. At last, officials commissioned a lieutenant trained as a scientist, Gilbert Daniels, to look at the physical structures of the cockpit and the men who used them. Daniels noted that all the cockpit structures—seat and back, pedals, knobs, and so on—had been built to specifications calculated for an average military recruit. Recruits for pilot training were already selected for some degree of averageness, had been the reasoning, so these dimensions should fit most pilots, most of the time. But when Daniels measured 4,063 soldiers, he was astonished to find that not a single one of the men fit all ten of the measurements that had been determined to be average. Instead, every body offered its own variation: One pilot might have a longer-than-average arm length, but a shorter-than-average leg length. Another pilot might have a big chest but small hips. Even more astonishing, Daniels discovered that if you picked just three of the ten dimensions of size—say, neck circumference, thigh circumference, and wrist circumference—less than 3.5 percent of pilots would be average sized on all three dimensions. Daniels’s findings were clear and incontrovertible. There was no such thing as an average pilot. The unyielding fixity of the average cockpit ended up being useful to exactly no one. Thereafter, aeronautical engineers began to make everything from seats and foot pedals to flight suits and helmet straps adjustable, and the Air Force adjusted its cockpit specifications to stipulate movable parts that could be adapted to fit a range of body measurements, from 5 to 95 percent of average, just right.

Mom had planted both wheat seeds and sugar cane, taking care to put them in nice, even rows, and stood back to admire her work, dusting off her hands. “It looks pretty good to me!” With that task finished, Mom went into one of the empty houses, to see if she could find anything else to plant. She was disappointed, though. The house was barren- hardly anything in it at all.  She went through each house and discovered that every single one was pretty much stripped bare. No belongings, no decorations, no furniture. Ethan had been wrong about how much stuff there was in the town. Elijah was going to have to stop burning things for warmth!  Mom had been searching through houses for a while with no luck, so she decided to check on the garden. A smile spread across her face when saw the wheat had already grown in! She could get used to ultra-fast-growing plants. With a skip in her step, she went to find the villagers. The double-E’s were outside their house examining their broken front door. It hung off its hinges, and an entire piece the size of a dog was just missing. Elijah threw his arms in the air. “I don't know how to fix a door!” “Me either,” Ethan said while he scratched his head, “but we have to figure it out. If we don't have doors, the zombies will just come right in and eat us.”  “I can help,” Mom said. The mayors jumped, startled.  “Don’t sneak up on us like that!” Elijah said.

For eighteen hours we had neither drunk nor eaten anything. My body and mind both felt strangely distant. Both were aching for some relief. In the porch of our tiny single-skinned tent, I reached out to hug Neil again. Then--unceremoniously--I collapsed. “Bear, come on, buddy. You’ve got to get inside the tent properly. Bear, can you hear me?” Michael’s voice brought me round. He had been waiting for us at the col--hoping. I shuffled backward into the tent. My head was pounding. I needed to drink. I hadn’t peed for more than twenty-four hours. Neil and Alan were slowly shedding their harnesses. Neither had the energy to speak. Michael passed me a warm drink from the stove. I was so happy to see him and Geoffrey in one piece. As the afternoon turned to evening we talked. I hadn’t really known fully why Michael and Geoffrey had retreated. They told their story. Of the impending storm and their growing fatigue, as they struggled in the deep snow and thin air. Their retreat had been a decision based on sound mountain judgment. A good call. Hence they were alive. We, though, had kept going. That decision had been based on an element of recklessness. But we got lucky, and that storm never came. Daring had won out--this time. It doesn’t always. Knowing when to be reckless and when to be safe is the great mountaineering game. I knew that. Michael turned to me later as we were getting ready for our last night in the Death Zone. He told me something that I have never forgotten. It was the voice of twenty years’ climbing experience in the wild Rockies of Canada. “Bear, do you realize the risk you guys were taking up there? It was more recklessness than good judgment, in my opinion.” He smiled and looked right at me. “My advice: from now on in your life, rein it back a fraction--and you will go far. You’ve survived this time--now go use that good fortune.” I have never forgotten those words.

How did the senator know that children meant happiness? Could he see into their souls? What if, the moment they were out of sight, three of them jumped the fourth and began beating him up? The senator had only one argument in his favor: his feeling. When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object. In the realm of kitsch, the dictatorship of the heart reigns supreme. The feeling induced by kitsch must be a kind the multitudes can share. Kitsch may not, therefore, depend on an unusual situation; it must derive from the basic images people have engraved in their memories: the ungrateful daughter, the neglected father, children running on the grass, the motherland betrayed, first love. Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass! The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass! It is the second tear that makes kitsch kitsch. The brotherhood of man on earth will be possible only on a base of kitsch. And no one knows this better than politicians. Whenever a camera is in the offing, they immediately run to the nearest child, lift it in the air, kiss it on the cheek. Kitsch is the aesthetic ideal of all politicians and all political parties and movements. Those of us who live in a society where various political tendencies exist side by side and competing influences cancel or limit one another can manage more or less to escape the kitsch inquisition: the individual can preserve his individuality; the artist can create unusual works. But whenever a single political movement corners power, we find ourselves in the realm of totalitarian kitsch. When I say totalitarian, what I mean is that everything that infringes on kitsch must be banished for life: every display of individualism (because a deviation from the collective is a spit in the eye of the smiling brotherhood); every doubt (because anyone who starts doubting details will end by doubting life itself); all irony (because in the realm of kitsch everything must be taken quite seriously); and the mother who abandons her family or the man who prefers men to women, thereby calling into question the holy decree Be fruitful and multiply. In this light, we can regard the gulag as a septic tank used by totalitarian kitsch to dispose of its refuse.

Once again I sensed in myself the mysterious gestation of that language so different from words blunted by use, a language in which I could have said softly, meeting Charlotte’s gaze: ‘Why does my heart miss a beat when I hear the distant call of the Kukushka? Why does an autumn morning in Cherbourg a hundred years ago, yes, a moment I have never lived through, in a town I have never visited, why do its light and breeze seem to me more alive than the days of my real life? Why does your balcony no longer float in the mauve air of the evening above the steppe? The transparency of dreams that once enveloped it is now broken like an alchemist’s flask. And the glass splinters crunch together and prevent us talking as we used to . . . Are not your memories, which I now know by heart, a cage that holds you prisoner? Is not our life simply the daily transformation of the fluid and warm present into a collection of frozen memories, like butterflies crucified on their pins in a dusty glass case? And if so, why do I sense that I should without hesitation exchange this whole collection for the unique sharp taste left on my lips by that little imaginary silver dish in that illusory café at Neuilly? For a single mouthful of Cherbourg’s salt breeze? For a single cry of the Kukushka recalled from my childhood?

Because I’m forty-one and single, does that mean I should have to compromise every standard I’ve ever had for myself and for the person I hope to marry, just so I can make it down the aisle at all costs? Does being single in your thirties and forties and beyond have to automatically equal settling, just to avoid winding up alone? And, if so, what exactly does that say about the value we place on our own life and our own solo journey? Here’s the thing: I like my life. I like my schedule. I like staying up late and sleeping in. I like the quiet, peaceful hours between midnight and 3:00 a.m. I also like choosing to turn in at 8:00 p.m. if I want to, and I like stretching across the entire bed when I do. Better yet, I like using the empty side of the bed for the books and magazines and other materials I read late into the night. Or for my laptop. Or for that stack of DVDs I’m making my way through (rewatching Pretty Little Liars for about the tenth time, currently). I like running my fan at night as I sleep, and I like keeping the window up to let in the cool air in the fall so I can snuggle even deeper into my covers. I like that I don’t have to listen to anyone snoring as I sleep, since I’m such a light sleeper that I can hear a mosquito sneeze in the next county. I like that if I wake up at 4:00 a.m. and want to eat cookies in bed, I can, and I won’t wake anyone up in the process. I like that my DVR is filled with This Is Us, Survivor, and reruns of The Golden Girls and Friends rather than football or the news.

Not unlike the herbicide-spraying campaigns in Asia, Central Europe was also flown over by helicopters spraying chemicals intended to wipe out the deciduous forests, which had gone out of fashion. Beech and oak trees held very little value at that time; low oil prices meant that no one was interested in firewood. The scales were tilted in favour of spruce – sought after by the timber industry and safe from being devoured by the high game populations. Over 5,000 square kilometres of deciduous woodlands was cleared just in my local region of Eifel and Hunsrück, through this merciless method of dropping death from the air. The carrier for the substance, sold under the trade name Tormona, was diesel oil. Elements of this mixture may still lurk in the soil of our forests today; the rusty diesel drums are certainly still lying around in some places. Have things improved now? Not completely, because chemical sprays are still used, even if they’re not directed at the trees themselves. The target of the helicopters and trucks with their atomising nozzles is the insects that feed on the trees and wood. Because the drab spruce and pine monocultures give free rein to bark beetles and butterfly caterpillars, these are then bumped off with contact insecticides. The pesticides, with names like Karate, are so lethal for three months that mere contact spells the end for any unfortunate insects. Parts of a forest that have been sprayed with pesticide are usually marked and fenced off for a while, but wood piles at the side of the track are often not considered dangerous. I would therefore advise against sitting on them when you’re ready for a rest stop and look out for a mossy stump instead, which is guaranteed to be harmless. This is quite apart from the fact that freshly harvested softwood is often very resinous. The stains don’t come out in the normal wash; you need to attack it with a special stain remover. Stacked wood carries another danger: the whole pile is liable to come crashing down. When you know that a single trunk can weigh hundreds of kilograms, you tend to stay away from a precariously stacked pile. It’s not for nothing that the German name for a wood stack is Polter, as in the crashing and banging of a poltergeist. Back to the poison. In areas sprayed by helicopter I wouldn’t pick berries or mushrooms for the rest of the summer. Otherwise, the forest is low in harmful substances compared to industrial agriculture.

To make this point, I often do the same coin flipping exercise that I explained during the probability discussion. In a class of forty students or so, I’ll have each student flip a coin. Any student who flips tails is eliminated; the rest flip again. In the second round, those who flip tails are once again eliminated. I continue the rounds of flipping until one student has flipped five or six heads in a row. You may recall some of the silly follow-up questions: “What’s your secret? Is it in the wrist? Can you teach us to flip heads all the time? Maybe it’s that Harvard sweatshirt you’re wearing.” Obviously the string of heads is just luck; the students have all watched it happen. However, that is not necessarily how the result could or would be interpreted in a scientific context. The probability of flipping five heads in a row is 1/32, or .03. This is comfortably below the .05 threshold we typically use to reject a null hypothesis. Our null hypothesis in this case is that the student has no special talent for flipping heads; the lucky string of heads (which is bound to happen for at least one student when I start with a large group) allows us to reject the null hypothesis and adopt the alternative hypothesis: This student has a special ability to flip heads. After he has achieved this impressive feat, we can study him for clues about his flipping success—his flipping form, his athletic training, his extraordinary concentration while the coin is in the air, and so on. And it is all nonsense. This phenomenon can plague even legitimate research. The accepted convention is to reject a null hypothesis when we observe something that would happen by chance only 1 in 20 times or less if the null hypothesis were true. Of course, if we conduct 20 studies, or if we include 20 junk variables in a single regression equation, then on average we will get 1 bogus statistically significant finding.

It does something to you when you are running close to what you perceive as our limit (back then, I still topped at 40 percent) and there is someone else out there who makes the difficult look effortless. It was obvious that his preparedness was several levels above our own. Captain Connolly did not show up to simply get through the program and graduate so he could collect some wings for his uniform and belong to the unspoken fraternity of supposed badasses at Fort Campbell. He came to explore what he was made of and grow. That required a willingness to set a new standard wherever possible and make a statement, not necessarily to our dumb asses, but to himself. He was respectful to all the instructors and the school, but he was not there to be led... Most people love standards. It gives the brain something to focus on, which helps us reach a place of achievement. Organizational structure and atta' boys from our instructors or bosses keep us motivated to perform and to move up on that bell curve. Captain Connolly did not require external motivation. He trained to his own standard and used the existing structure for his own purposes. Air Assault School became his own personal octagon, where he could test himself on a level even the instructors hadn't imagined. For the next nine days, he put his head down and quietly went about the business of smashing every single standard at Air Assault School. He saw the bar that the instructors pointed to and the rest of us were trying to tap as a hurdle to leap over, and he did it time and again. He understood that his rank only meant something if he sought out a different certification: an invisible badge that says, "I am the example. Follow me, motherfuckers, and I will show you that there is more to this life than so-called authority and stripes or candy on a uniform. I'll show you what true ambition looks like beyond all the external structure in a place of limitless mental growth." He didn't say any of that. He didn't run his mouth at all. I can't recall him uttering word one in ten fucking days, but through his performance and extreme dedication, he dropped breadcrumbs for anybody who was awake and aware enough to follow him. He flashed his tool kit. He showed us what potent, silent, exemplary leadership looked like. He checked into every Gold Group run, which was led by the fastest instructor in that school, and volunteered to be the first to carry the flag. p237

It does something to you when you are running close to what you perceive as our limit (back then, I still topped at 40 percent) and there is someone else out there who makes the difficult look effortless. It was obvious that his preparedness was several levels above our own. Captain Connolly did not show up to simply get through the program and graduate so he could collect some wings for his uniform and belong to the unspoken fraternity of supposed badasses at Fort Campbell. He came to explore what he was made of and grow. That required a willingness to set a new standard wherever possible and make a statement, not necessarily to our dumb asses, but to himself. He was respectful to all the instructors and the school, but he was not there to be led... Most people love standards. It gives the brain something to focus on, which helps us reach a place of achievement. Organizational structure and atta' boys from our instructors or bosses keep us motivated to perform and to move up on that bell curve. Captain Connolly did not require external motivation. He trained to his own standard and used the existing structure for his own purposes. Air Assault School became his own personal octagon, where he could test himself on a level even the instructors hadn't imagined. For the next nine days, he put his head down and quietly went about the business of smashing every single standard at Air Assault School. He saw the bar that the instructors pointed to and the rest of us were trying to tap as a hurdle to leap over, and he did it time and again. He understood that his rank only meant something if he sought out a different certification: an invisible badge that says, "I am the example. Follow me, motherfuckers, and I will show you that there is more to this life than so-called authority and stripes or candy on a uniform. I'll show you what true ambition looks like beyond all the external structure in a place of limitless mental growth." He didn't say any of that. He didn't run his mouth at all. I can't recall him uttering word one in ten fucking days, but through his performance and extreme dedication, he dropped breadcrumbs for anybody who was awake and aware enough to follow him. He flashed his tool kit. He showed us what potent, silent, exemplary leadership looked like. He checked into every Gold Group run, which was led by the fastest instructor in that school, and volunteered to be the first to carry the flag... His conditioning was clearly off the charts, and I'm not talking about the physical aspect alone. Being a physical specimen is one thing, but it takes so much more energy to stay mentally prepared enough to arrive every day at a place like Air Assault School on a mission to dominate. The fact that he was able to do that told me it couldn't possibly have been a one-time thing. It had to be the result of countless lonely hours in the gym, on the trails, and in the books. Most of his work was hidden, but it is within that unseen work that self-leaders are made. I suspect the reason he was capable of exceeding any and all standards consistently was because he was dedicated at a level most people cannot fathom in order to stay ready for any and all opportunities. p237

His father curled a finger toward him. “I have need of your gift.” “Why?” His Starborn abilities were little more than a sparkle of starlight in his palm. His shadow talents were the more interesting gift. Even the temperature monitors on the high-tech cameras in this city couldn’t detect him when he shadow-walked. His father held up the prism. “Direct a beam of your starlight through this.” Not waiting for an answer, his father again put an eye to the metal viewing contraption atop the prism. It ordinarily took Ruhn a good amount of concentration to summon his starlight, and it usually left him with a headache for hours afterward, but … He was intrigued enough to try. Setting his index finger onto the crystal of the prism, Ruhn closed his eyes and focused upon his breathing. Let the clicking metal of the orrery guide him down, down, down into the black pit within himself, past the churning well of his shadows, to the little hollow beneath them. There, curled upon itself like some hibernating creature, lay the single seed of iridescent light. He gently cupped it with a mental palm, stirring it awake as he carefully brought it upward, as if he were carrying water in his hands. Up through himself, the power shimmering with anticipation, warm and lovely and just about the only part of himself he liked. Ruhn opened his eyes to find the starlight dancing at his fingertip, refracting through the prism. His father adjusted a few dials on the device, jotting down notes with his other hand. The starlight seed became slippery, disintegrating into the air around them. “Just another moment,” the king ordered. Ruhn gritted his teeth, as if it’d somehow keep the starlight from dissolving. Another click of the device, and another jotted note in an ancient, rigid hand. The Old Language of the Fae—his father recorded everything in the half-forgotten language their people had used when they had first come to Midgard through the Northern Rift. The starlight shivered, flared, and faded into nothing. The Autumn King grunted in annoyance, but Ruhn barely heard it over his pounding head. He’d mastered himself enough to pay attention as his father finished his notes. “What are you even doing with that thing?” “Studying how light moves through the world. How it can be shaped.” “Don’t we have scientists over at CCU doing this shit?” “Their interests are not the same as mine.” His father

When World War One broke out in 1914, planes were initially used for intelligence gathering. The machines, which moved faster than any man made device had ever, flew at approximately 80 miles per hour. No plane in WWI flew faster than 145mph, and that was at the very end of the war.               Of course, neither side wanted the other to spy on its troop movements, so within a very short period of time, pilots were trying to bring each other down. Initially, the first dogfights, strange as it may seem, were fought with grappling hooks hanging below the plane, grenades, and ramming. This was both highly inefficient and highly dangerous (for everyone involved). The first plane-to-plane combat was on the Eastern Front where a Russian pilot, who probably meant to graze his enemy, crashed his plane into an Austro-Hungarian machine. He and the two man crew of the Austrian plane were killed.               Soon, pilots began shooting at each other with pistols and the single shot rifles of the time. You can guess how effective this was.

Aware of the new technologies that were out there, I also recommended the use of laptop computers for flight crew management and control. The use of the on-orbit displays and controls made possible through the laptop, when ultimately instituted, has since paid for itself many times over. I also recommended we use offline computers such as ThinkPads to aid the shuttle during ascent and entry so that we could freeze the guidance, control, and navigation software if necessary. That idea too was rejected. To those who regularly turned me down, I always asked, “So, do you have a better idea?” This time around I asked thirty-two folks, none of whom returned a single suggestion.

I thought the submarine environment would be a useful analogy for the space station in a number of ways, and I especially wanted my colleagues to get an up-close look at how the Navy deals with CO2. What we learned on that trip was illuminating: the Navy has their submarines turn on their air scrubbers when the CO2 concentration rises above two millimeters of mercury, even though the scrubbers are noisy and risk giving away the submarine’s location. By comparison, the international agreement on ISS says the CO2 is acceptable up to six millimeters of mercury! The submarine’s chief engineering officer explained to us that the symptoms of high CO2 posed a threat to their work, so keeping that level low was a priority. I felt that NASA should be thinking of it the same way. When I prepared for my first flight on the ISS, I got acquainted with a new carbon dioxide removal system. The lithium hydroxide cartridges were foolproof and reliable, but that system depended on cartridges that were to be thrown away after use—not very practical, since hundreds of cartridges would be required to get through a single six-month mission. So instead we now have a device called the carbon dioxide removal assembly, or CDRA, pronounced “seedra,” and it has become the bane of my existence. There are two of them—one in the U.S. lab and one in Node 3. Each weighs about five hundred pounds and looks something like a car engine. Covered in greenish brown insulation, the Seedra is a collection of electronic boxes, sensors, heaters, valves, fans, and absorbent beds. The absorbent beds use a zeolite crystal to separate the CO2 from the air, after which the lab Seedra dumps the CO2 out into space through a vacuum valve, while the Node 3 Seedra combines oxygen drawn from the CO2 with leftover hydrogen from our oxygen-generating system in a device called Sabatier. The result is water—which we drink—and methane, which is also vented overboard.

Try. It’s more efficient. You can’t go through life doing this the wrong way. The wasted minutes could add up to days. Weeks.” An unexpected giggle escaped her, as if she were a young girl being teased. “I don’t use a pencil that often.” Devon reached around her, his hands engulfing hers. And she let him. She stood still, her body wary but compliant. A fragile trust had been established during their earlier encounter--no matter what else she might fear from him, she seemed to understand that he wouldn’t hurt her. The pleasure of holding her washed through him in repeated waves. She was petite and fine-boned, the delicious fragrance of roses rising to his nostrils. He’d noticed it when he’d held her earlier…not a cloying perfume, but a light floral essence swept with the sharp freshness of winter air. “All it takes is six cuts,” he said near her ear. She nodded, relaxing against him as he guided her hands with precision. One deep stroke of the lade neatly removed an angled section of wood. They rotated the pencil and made another cut, and then a third, creating a precise triangular prism. “Now trim the sharp edges.” They concentrated on the task with his hands still bracketed over hers, using the blade to chamfer each corner of wood until they had created a clean, satisfying point. Done. After one last luxurious inhalation of her scent, Devon released her slowly, knowing that for the rest of his life, a single breath of a rose would bring him back to this moment.

Particle theory explains that all matter is made of many small particles that are always moving. There are particles in solids, liquids, and gases, and all of them continually vibrate, in varying directions, speeds, and intensities.17 Particles can only interact with matter by transferring energy. Waves are the counterpart to particles. There are three ways to regard waves: •​A disturbance in a medium through which energy is transferred from one particle within the medium to another, without making a change in the medium. •​A picture of this disturbance over time. •​A single cycle representing this disturbance. Waves have a constructive influence on matter when they superimpose or interact by creating other waves. They have a destructive influence when reflected waves cancel each other out. Scientists used to believe that particles were different from waves, but this is not always true, as you will see in the definition of wave-particle duality in this section. Waves, or particles operating in wave mode, oscillate, or swing between two points in a rhythmic motion. These oscillations create fields, which can in turn create more fields. For instance, oscillating charged electrons form an electrical field, which generates a magnetic field, which in turn creates an electrical field. Superposition in relation to waves means that a field can create effects in other objects, and in turn be affected itself. Imagine that a field stimulates oscillations in an atom. In turn, this atom makes its own waves and fields. This new movement can force a change in the wave that started it all. This principle allows us to combine waves; the result is the superposition. We can also subtract waves from each other. Energy healing often involves the conscious or inadvertent addition or subtraction of waves. In addition, this principle helps explain the influence of music, which often involves combining two or more frequencies to form a chord or another harmonic. A harmonic is an important concept in healing, as each person operates at a unique harmonic or set of frequencies. A harmonic is defined as an integer multiple of a fundamental frequency. This means that a fundamental tone generates higher-frequency tones called overtones. These shorter, faster waves oscillate between two ends of a string or air column. As these reflected waves interact, the frequencies of wavelengths that do not divide into even proportions are suppressed, and the remaining vibrations are called the harmonics. Energy healing is often a matter of suppressing the “bad tones” and lifting the “good tones.” But all healing starts with oscillation, which is the basis of frequency. Frequency is the periodic speed at which something vibrates. It is measured in hertz (Hz), or cycles per second. Vibration occurs when something is moving back and forth. More formally, it is defined as a continuing period oscillation relative to a fixed point—or one full oscillation.