The cab left him at number four thousand four on that street in the northwest part of Buenos Aires. It was not yet nine in the morning; the man noted with approval the spotted plane trees, the square plot of earth at the foot of each, the respectable houses with their little balconies, the pharmacy alongside, the dull lozenges of the paint and hardware store. A long windowless hospital wall backed the sidewalk on the other side of the street; the sun reverberated, farther down, from some greenhouses. The man thought that these things (now arbitrary and accidental and in no special order, like the things one sees in dreams) would in time, if God willed, become invariable, necessary and familiar. In the pharmacy window porcelain letters spelled out the name “Breslauer”; the Jews were displacing the Italians, who had displaced the Creoles. It was better that way; the man preferred not to mingle with people of his kind.

Excerpted from “The Waiting” by Jorge Luis Borges, appearing in Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings. Translated by James E. Irby, published by New Directions, New York, 1962.

Summoning her courage, she motioned to Tyler and led them inside. It took a few moments for their eyes to adjust to the relative darkness of the interior. They stood in a cavernous temple, the heights of which were lost in shadows. Three enormous bronze buddhas, representing the past, the present, and the future, sat enthroned upon their long altar, the front of which was decorated with elaborate and colorful filigreed panels representing the auspicious symbols of the religion. Concrete pillars rose up to the ceiling, decorated with bright red banners adorned with black calligraphy. Other banners hung from the ceiling, ending in rich tassels of red silk. A forest of incense sticks burned inside wide stone urns of sand. Baskets of fruit offerings sat between banks of candles, and it was all Allison could do, after having stolen a bicycle from a peasant and honey from a farmer, not to steal fruit from the gods.

A group of monks in saffron robes stood chanting at the far end of the altar, their resonant chorus echoing from the high stone walls. One of the monks beat on a deep drum that reverberated like thunder through the temple. Another rang a brass gong, while yet another sounded chimes. Their voices rose and fell in unison in a steady, rhythmic mantra of worship, their shaved heads bowed over hands folded in prayer. Seemingly oblivious to the three visitors who stood dripping in the entryway, the monks never faltered in their mesmerizing incantation.

Excerpted from China Run by David Ball. Published by Simon & Schuster, New York, 2002.

That is why I fight my battle with Monopolated Light & Power. The deeper reason, I mean: It allows me to feel my vital aliveness. I also fight them for taking so much of my money before I learned to protect myself. In my hole in the basement there are exactly 1,369 lights. I’ve wired the entire ceiling, every inch of it. And not with fluorescent bulbs, but with the older, more-expensive-to-operate kind, the filament type. An act of sabotage, you know. I’ve already begun to wire the wall. A junk man I know, a man of vision, has supplied me with wire and sockets. Nothing, storm or flood, must get in the way of our need for light and and ever more and brighter light. The truth is light and the light is truth. When I finish all four walls, then I’ll start on the floor. Just how long that will go, I don’t know. Yet when you have lived invisible as long as I have develop a certain ingenuity. I’ll solve the problem. And maybe I’ll invent a gadget to place my coffee pot on the fire while I lie in bed, and even invent a gadget to warm my bed—like the fellow I saw in one of the picture magazines who made himself a gadget to warm his shoes! Though invisible, I am in the great American tradition of tinkerers. That makes me kin to Ford, Edison and Franklin. Call me, since I have a theory and a concept, a “thinker-tinkerer.” Yes, I’ll warm my shoes; they need it, they’re usually full of holes. I’ll do that and more.

Excerpted from The Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison. Original copyright 1947, published by Vintage, New York, 1995.

There have been all sorts of mechanical pickers advertised, but none has ever become popular. They are of two kinds. The first kind, intended to pick a single apple at a time out of the higher branches, consists of some sort of pocket hung on the end of a long pole. These contrivances are too slow and cumbersome for any commercial work. The second style presents some modification of the old practice of shaking apples off trees. It furnishes some kind a of a spread held under the branches upon which the apples are shaken down. While the method is cheap enough to make it commercially available, it is too rough for the exacting demands of present-day business. By all means the best way of putting up commercial apples is to pick by hand from the trees.

There is something of a knack in picking apples, but unfortunately expert apple pickers are not often to be hired. The fruit-grower is usually obliged to put up with ordinary day labor and to make up in the carefulness of his own supervision the lack of experience on the part of the pickers. Apple pickers usually get the prevailing day wages; that is, from $1 to $1.75 a day.

Excerpted from The American Apple Orchard: A Sketch of the Practice of Apple Growing in North America at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century by F. A. Waugh. Published by Orange Judd Company, New York, 1912.

This has been the case, and where a few years ago the Box elder Bug was an unknown insect it is now found in large and increasing numbers. Still this great increase would not be noticed, or only be a few more observing persons, if this insect did not possess the peculiar habit of crowding together late in autumn, preliminary to searching for suitable quarters to hibernate. As soon as the foliage of the box elder becomes dry and discolored, or, in other words, as soon as the leaves of the tree no longer offer liquid sap to the insects, these desert such useless sources of food, and descend to the limbs and trunks of the trees. Here they gather in large numbers, perhaps to hold indignation meetings about the shortness of summer and food supplies! At all events they crowd together, old and young, as if waiting for better times. Whenever the sun shines and warms one side of the trunk, or the sidewalk below the tree, there these bugs are sure to congregate. Later, and when the leaves commence to drop, all bugs have reached their full size, and are winged. But they do not use their wings, and are very sensible not to do so, because they assuredly would be blown about the adjoining prairies and would perish. They now search for winter quarters. If the sidewalk under the box elder trees, their old homes, should be a wooden one, most of the bugs will find shelter under it. If no such shelters are found, however, the insects enter barns and stables, and are not slow to enter even houses, much to the disgust of the ladies of the household. The bugs are decidedly stupid, at least they cannot be scared away, but have to be forcibly ejected. This habit of crowding into dwellings has been the cause of many complaints.

Excerpted from Sixth Annual Report of the Entomologist of the State Experiment Station of the University of Minnesota to the Governor for the Year 1900 by Otto Lugger. Published by McGill-Warner Co., St. Paul, Minnesota, 1900.

Baseball remains in trouble with the general public, though, despite the ticket prices people pay and the flocks who keep showing up to pay them. An ESPN poll revealed that among kids, the next generation of fans, football is number one, basketball is number two, and baseball is number three in popularity, with only 18 percent expressing the opinion that the national pastime is their favorite game. With owners looking to max revenues now instead of build for the long term, they started nationally telecast playoff games, their most critical television product, at increasingly late hours, alienating the fans of the future who couldn’t stay up to watch the conclusions, let alone the fans of the past and present who didn’t want to stay up, either. Will maxing out ad revenues now backfire in later in eroded fan support? Probably, if it hasn’t already. Will it erode sponsor support, pegged at as much as $9 million per team per year? Maybe, if the sport no longer serves as the conduit for the corporation to reach the consumer …

So, increasingly, the corporation becomes and maintains itself as the conduit for the fan to get to the game and get closer to the game, however that may be.

Excerpted from Sports Marketing by Howard Schlossberg. Published by Blackwell, Malden, Massachusetts, 1996.

Out to the freezing banks of the Sumida River he led us, to see the rows of tuna laid out for the morning auctions. Blanketing in the thick cocoons of frost, solidly frozen tuna the size of tree trunks clinked like brittle chimes as prospective buyers picked out slivers of tail meat for inspection. Crowds of buyers and auctioneers warmed their hands at fires stoked with the broken wooden crates lying about. We watched auctions go by in a split second as Watanabe tried to explain to us the hand signals and staccato chants that indicated bids. He led us through warrens of stalls where he or his chef apprentice would stop for a moment to purchase a kilogram of shrimp, or a large cut of tuna, or several legs of octopus, a tray or two of sea urchin roe, and then thrust the purchase into a rectangular wooden basked slung over the junior apprentice’s shoulder. If money changed hands, I didn’t see it. In the fast conversations back and forth I couldn’t catch any discussions of prices. Watanabe and his crew knew exactly where they were going, and what they wanted to buy when they got there. Though they paused along the way to examine products at many stalls scattered around the marketplace, to my inexperienced eyes the ikura (salmon roe) they didn’t purchase where they bought the kamaboko (fish pâté) looked identical to the salmon roe they did buy at the stall where they ignored the pâté.

Excerpted from Tsukiji: The Fish Market at the Center of the World by Theodore C. Bestor. Published by University of California Press, Berkeley, 2004.

Location of the Hillsboro Cemetery is in Highland County, State Rt 138 South West, Hillsboro, Ohio 45133. Hillsboro Cemetery was created on May 30, 1862 as recorded in Original Book 30, page 349, Highland County Deed Records, the Hillsboro Cemetery Association of the Town Hillsborough purchased from Allen TRIMBLE and wife RACHEL 31 acres 1 quarter and 25 poles of land for a cemetery. On July 22, 1862, in the Original Book 30, page 351, the Association sold to Lafayette Lodge No. 25 of the Independent Order of Odd Fellows of Hillsboro 4 acres. 1 rod and 15 poles “to hold and use the above described premises for burial purposes exclusively”.

Excerpted from ‘Hillsboro Cemetery‘ on RootsWeb. Last updated November 11, 2004.

We have never said—until the skyscraper—“We want such and such a building because it is suited to our lives , the way we work, the way we play, the way we live—simple, strong, and fairly intelligent lives.” At least, if it has been said before the last few years, it was in a whisper, and the idea was never realized. When a man of wealth among us has desired a home, he has not asked his architect to study the land upon which he was to build, and the stone he could quarry from the land, and the wood he could find in the forest, and the lay of the landscape, and the manner of life of the man who wanted the home. A check was written and the architect started fro Europe, or the Orient, or in any futile direction, and then he returned and imitated in wrong materials the most inappropriate place he had seen and the man lived in the place and was proud and uncomfortable. Thus our homes in general average about as national and personal an expression of our wants as a log cabin on the Boulevard des Italiens or an Indian tepee on the Nile.

But when difficulties arose with our housing problem in one long, narrow tape-measure of a city, and we found ourselves with twice as much business as space, it became impossible to sit around and wonder what Ptolemy would have done in the building line under the circumstances, or even to rely upon the architectural impulses of Italian nobles or the needs of monkish communities in the Middle Ages.

Circumstances put an iron hand upon counterfeit architecture for commercial purposes in New York, and forced us to build something that we, as a nation, needed, that was adapted to our own way of living and working, that in fact possessed national characteristics. The manifestation of this first honest building impulse in America was the skyscraper, maligned, wronged, insulted from the start, and yet up to the present time the finest architectural expression in this country because of the completeness of its adaptation to need. And it is the skyscraper that has changed the outline of New York City, that has revolutionized the quality of it, and that has created the first suggestion of beauty the city had ever laid claim to.

Excerpted from ‘How New York has Redeemed Herself from Ugliness—An Artist’s Revelation of the Beauty of the Skyscraper’ by Giles Edgerton. Originally appearing in The Craftsman, an Illustrated Monthly Magazine in the Interest of Better Art, Better Work, and a Better and More Reasonable Way of Living, volume 11. Published by Gustav Stickley, New York, 1907.

If you don’t like “street photographer,” how do you respond to that other tiresome phrase, “snapshot aesthetic”?

I knew that was coming. That’s another stupidity. The people who use the term don’t even know the meaning. They use it to refer to photographs they believe are loosely organized, or casually made, whatever you want to call it. Whatever terms you like. The fact is, when they’re talking about snapshots they’re talking about the family album picture, which is one of the most precisely made photographs. Everybody’s fifteen feet away and smiling. The sun is over the viewer’s shoulder. That’s when the picture is taken, always. It’s one of the most carefully made photographs that ever happened. People are just dumb. They misunderstand.

That’s an interesting point, particularly coming from someone who takes — or rather, composes and then snaps — lightning-fast shots.

I’ll say this, I’m pretty fast with a camera when I have to be. However, I think it’s irrelevant. I mean, what if I said that every photograph I made was set up? From the photograph, you can’t prove otherwise. You don’t know anything from the photograph about how it was made, really. But every photograph could be set up. If one could imagine it, one could set it up. The whole discussion is a way of not talking about photographs.

From Visions and Images: American Photographers on Photography by Barbaralee Diamonstein. Published by Rizoli, New York, 1981.

What to do
1. Choose a magazine picture.
2. Cut an important part of the picture such as the head of a dog, a baby’s foot, or a glass of milk. Glue it to the base of the paper or cardboard.
3. Choose another unrelated magazine picture and add a part of that picture to the first part. The idea is to make a silly picture combining unrelated parts such as the head of a dog, the body of a boy, two feet made of bananas, and so on.
4. When a substantially silly picture is complete, dry for an hour or so.

More to do
More art: Glue a part from a magazine picture on a piece of paper. Give the artist the challenge of adding other parts to the pre-glued piece.

Excerpted from ‘Mixed-up Magazine’ by Mary Ann Kohl. Originally appearing in The Giant Encyclopedia of Art & Craft Activities for Children 3 to 6, edited by Kathy Charner. Published by Grypon House, Beltsville, Maryland, 2000.

The physical domain contains a wide range of limitations, but generally relates to respiratory, metabolic, and musculoskeletal body functions associated with movement. The [2008 American Community Survey] focuses on ambulatory difficulties in question 17b of the 2008 questionnaire, which asked respondents aged 5 years and older, “Does this person have serious difficulty walking or climbing stairs?” In 2008, about 19.2 million people or 6.9 percent of the civilian noninstitutionalized population 5 years and older had an ambulatory difficulty …

For estimates of ambulatory difficulty, the [2008 Survey of Income and Program Participation] provides degrees of severity against which the ACS measure can be portrayed. Whereas the ACS measure asked about serious difficulty walking or climbing stairs, the SIPP measure asks about difficulty with each activity and follows up with questions about whether the respondent can perform the activity at all. The resulting measures show two levels of difficulty walking or climbing stairs. As shown in Figure 8, the ACS ambulatory difficulty measure falls in between the two SIPP measures, implying that it may capture difficulty that is more severe than the basic SIPP measure of difficulty walking or climbing stairs, but less severe than the measure of being unable to perform at least one of the activities.

Excerpted from Review of Changes to the Measurement of Disability in the 2008 American Community Survey by Matthew W. Brault. Published by the U.S. Census Bureau, September 22, 2009.

Where the grass is yellow-tangled / O’er a long-forgotten mound / Still a gray stone, lichen-hoary, / Lifts its record from the ground.

Now have passed three generations / Since the river quenched the life / Of the two, whose friends so crudely / Carved the stone with rustic knife.

Druid trees with gray moss bearded / Whisper o’er the mounded grass / Wierdly [sic] meet with incantations / Generations as they pass.

The full text of ‘River Hopewell’ by William Patrick MacKenzie as appearing in Voices and Undertones in Song and Poem. Published by Equity Publishing Co., New York, 1889.

Section II: The Interview. 3. Definition: a. The Army interview is a specialized pattern of verbal communication initiated for a specific purpose. This takes the interview out of the category of casual conversation or discussion for its own sake. Interviews normally are scheduled at an appropriate time and place to be free from distractions or disturbing factors. The interviewer is qualified and authorized to conduct the interview. He has a predetermined purpose that will affect the interviewee. The interviewer must create and maintain an atmosphere in which the respondent feels that he is understood and in which he is safe to communicate without fear of being judged or criticized. On the other hand, the respondent must be able and willing to assist in the accomplishment of the purpose.

b. The most common interview method used by the Army is the standardized or “patterned” interview because it is well adapted to recurring situations. Standardized interviews are used for evaluation of officer candidates, interviewing for assignment to special jobs, or interviewing for selection of leaders. The standardized interview involves the use of forms, such as an interview blank for recording impressions and a rating sheet when evaluation of the interviewee is required. Interviewers may be supplied a manual which describes the nature and purpose of the forms to be used and may outline, in some detail, the order of procedures to be followed. Rating sheets serve as guides to direct attention to important factors, insure that significant details are not neglected, and provide for systematic reporting. In addition to the specific directions supplied by the manual, the techniques of good interviewing as outlined in this pamphlet apply. Personnel assigned to conduct standardized interviews should be thoroughly familiar with the selection requirements of the area for which individuals are being considered as well as in the techniques of interviewing. Standardized interviews may be conducted by a board operating in formal session.

Excerpted from Department of the Army Pamphlet 611–1: ‘Personnel Selection and Classification: The Army Interview.’ Original publication from August 31, 1965. Unclassified.