Hooray!" said the Chief of the Army. "Let's blow everyone up! Bang-bang! Bang-bang!
They are a special breed-like normal accountants, but without the soppy sentimentality. These are the oncologists of market capitalism.
The uncomfortable truth is that we all enjoyed the party far too much to query where all the booze was coming from. Now we seem intent on lynching the barman for letting us get drunk and attacking the Government for letting us get a hangover.
Consumerism has become a new religion, complete with its high priests at Which? and its fatwas against anyone with the temerity to try to sell anything at more than cost price. . . It is a depressingly medieval outlook on economic life.
Sometimes I pick up the phone, listen to cold caller alias name, repeat it several times in an incredulous tone and then - bam! - pretend to recognise them. I ask them if they remember the hell of a time we had at the 1985 summer camp when we set fire to the wooden shed, and I keep making things up and go on and on until they end up terminating the call.
Try to sell cold callers something and be very insistent. Works well. Also good for door-to-door sales people, especially if they're wearing poor shoes.
I tell cold callers I'm very interested but a bit deaf, my hearing aid is not working properly and can they speak up. The idea is to deliberately miss-hear what they say, ask them to repeat, only louder, and see how loud I can get them to shout. After a while I say "I'm not really deaf" and was just wasting their time, as they were doing with me.
There is a powerful need for people to feel that gust of hope rise up again.
We are, in fact, hyper-dimentional objects of some sort which cast a shadow into matter, and the shadow in matter is the body. And at death, what happens basically, is that the shadow withdraws, or the thing which cast the shadow withdraws, and metabolism ceases, and matter which had been organized into a dissipative structure in a very localized area, sustaining itself against entropy by cycling material in and degrading it and expelling it, that whole phenomenon ceases, but the thing which ordered it is not affected by that.
In all judgements by which we describe anything as beautiful, we allow no one to be of another opinion.
Come on," Alec said, already stomping down the ramp. "Let's find us a squirrel. " He swept the weapon back and forth as he walked, looking for any interlopers. "Or better yet, one of the crazies who might've strayed over here. Too bad these things have to be charged or we could get rid of this virus problem in a jiffy. Sweep these old neighborhoods nice and clean. " Mark joined him on the ground below the Berg, wary that someone might be watching from the ruined homes surrounding them or from the burnt woods beyond those. "Your value of human life brings tears to my eyes," he muttered.