From page 52:
Page 52:
My page 52 starts with a long, partial paragraph, so here are the next two:
The gunmen formed a circle around the twelve of them.
“Down you go,” said one of the gunmen, pointing to the hole.
It’s not a book, but it is what I’m working my way through:
Desperation has led to a “dangerous” idea: perhaps we live in an anthropically selected universe. According to this view, we live in a multiverse (a multitude of universes) in which the cosmological constant varies randomly from one universe to the next. In most universes, the value is incompatible with the formation of galaxies, planets, and stars. The reason why our cosmological constant has the value it does is because it it is one of the rare examples in which the value happens to lie in the narrow range compatible with life.
This is the ultimate example of “unintelligent design”: the multiverse tries every possibility with reckless abandon and only very rarely gets things “right;” that is, consistent with everything we actually observe. It suggests that the creation of unimaginably enormous volumes of uninhabitable space is essential to obtain a few rare habitable spaces.
The link for the whole bit is: http://www.edge.org/q2006/q06_index.html
In fact, Taft-Hartley was far from a “slave labor act.” The ban on closed shops, to be sure, lessened the control that a few strong unions had had over hiring. But most unions mananged to live within the law. Swallowing civil libertarian scruples, they signed the non-Communist affidavits and continued to avail themselves of the protections and procedures of the NLRB. The major industrial unions bargained as before with employers. Aggressive, expanding unions such as the Teamsters - unltimately to become by far the nation’s largest union - flourished even in right-to-work states. By the 1950s most observers agreed that Taft-Hartley was no more disastorous for workers than the Wagner Act had been for employers. What ordinarily mattered most in labor relations was not government laws such as Taft-Hartley but the relative power of unions and management in the economic marketplace. Where unions were strong, they usually managed all right; when they were weak, new laws did them little additional harm.
Still, the success of Taft-Hartley revealed the the political power of organized labor was waning. Although the law did not repeal the Wagner Act - the conservatives who wrote it reaffirmed labor’s basic right to bargain collectively - its passage exposed broad popular suspicion of Big Labor that remianed strong thereafter. Unions, despite sustained lobbying, failed to secure revision of the law in the Democratic Congress of 1949 - or even in the heady years of liberal triumph in the mid-1960s.
Hah page 52 of my book is a blank chapter divider.
The next page (new chapter) goes as so…
As institutions go, the Ku Klux Klan has had a markedly up-and-down history. It was founded in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War by six former Confederate soldiers in Pulaski, Tennessee. The six young men, four of whom were budding lawyers, saw themselves as merely a circle of like-minded friends - thus the name they choise, “kuklux”, a slight mangling of kuklos, the Greek word for “circle”. They added klan because they were all of Scotch-Irish descent. In the beginning, their activities were said to be harmless midnight pranks - riding horses through the countryside while draped in white sheets and pillowcase hoods. But soon the Klan evolved into a multi-state terrorist organization designed to frighten and kill empancipated slaves.
(long paragraph continues)
Yup - it’s the second book I’ve read by him. I loved Sex, drugs and cocoa puffs…
It was twilight. It was always twilight in the woods, with the sun permanently setting. Or was it rising? It was difficult to tell. Certainly noone who entered the Twilight Woods could ever be sure. Most, however, felt that the golden half-light between the trees whispered of endings, not beginnings.
The trees, majestically tall and always in full leaf, swayed in a gentle breeze which endlessly circled the woods.They, like everything else - the grass, the ground, the flowers - were coated in a mantle of fine dust which glittered and glistened like frost.
Nobody but I even did him the kindness to call him a dirty boy, and bid him wash himself, once a week; and children of his age, seldom have a natural pleasure in soap and water. Therefore, not to mention his clothes, which had seen three months service, in mire and dust, and his thick uncombed hair, the surface of his face and hands was dismally beclouded. He might well skulk behind the settle, on beholding such a bright, graceful damsel enter the house, instead of a rough-headed counterpart to himself, as he expected.
“Is Heathcliff not here?” she demanded, pulling off her gloves and displaying fingers wonderfully whitened with doing nothing and staying indoors.
Leaphorn extracted the snuff can from the pouch, took out the diamond, and let the sunlight shine through it. He turned it, examined it.
“Seems to have been shaped to fit into some sort of necklace. A pendant. You just gave him some groceries for it and got you his horse, too? I’d say you struck a pretty hard bargain,” he said. “Sounds to me like you were trying to practice ‘the way to make money.’”
Only one full paragraph on page 52:
Thus, an observer transported back in time to 11,000 B.C. could not have predicted on which continent human societies would develop more quickly, but could have made a strong case for any of the continents. With hindsight, of course, we know that Eurasia was the one. But it turns out that the actual reasons behind the more rapid development of Eurasian societies was not at all the straightforward ones that our imaginary archaeologist of 11,000 B.C. guessed. The remainder of this book consists of a quest to discover those real reasons.
I almost fell asleep just typing this.
By the way, PastAllReason, what are you reading? Sounds like it might be interesting.
Seren, I’m reading Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond. Well, that and *Blink * by Malcolm Gladwell. And a book on Art Deco by Judith Miller. I’m on holidays, can you tell?
Anyway, so far I’m about 1/3 of the way through the Diamond book, and I am finding it quite interesting.
Donna shook her head. “Don’t you remember anything?” she asked. “We have to go meet the caterer to talk about appetizers.”
“I thought we already did that,” Reilly said.
Ah - I’m about 3/4 through this one.
And just finished re-reading this one.
Susan
The argument went on for four consecutive nights, and then, on the fifth, a Friday, Alvin didn’t report to eat, though the idea had been to keep him showing up regularly for dinner until my father wore him down and the boy came to his senses-the boy whom my father had single-handedly changed from a callow good-for-nothing into the family’s conscience.
The next morning we learned from Billy Steinheim, who was closest to Alvin of any of the sons and concerned enough about him to telephone us first thing Saturday, that after having received his Friday pay packet Alvin had thrown the keys to the Caddy in Billy’s father’s face and walked out, and when my father rushed off in our car to Wright Street to talk to Alvin in his room and get the whole story and gauge just how much damage he had done to his chances, the shoeshine parlor proprietor who was Alvin’s landlord told him that the tenant had paid the rent and packed his things and was off to fight against the very worst human being ever born. Given the magnitude of Alvin’s seething, no one less nefarious would do.
“Seven more months to go,” he said. He was a private first class in the Artillery. His uniform was rumpled. His shoes were dusty. He needed a shave. He held out his hand for the magazine. “Let’s see the pretty book,” he said.
She gave it to him. “I’m getting married, Newt,” she said.
“He says he’s never been crazy, Bugs,” Ad said.
“He’s got a lot coming to him,” the Negro said. He was unwrapping a package by the fire.
No paragraphs as such, so I’ll give lines in the play.
Creon: Since Laïus…? I follow not thy drift.
Oedipus: By violent hands was spirited away.