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Tuesday, December 31, 2002

046—Going West, from “The Brick,” by James Stegall, from

“I say, in the Special Forces I learned to let go of anger. I learned to run with no thought of how far. I learned to carry the ammo crate as far as it must be carried, no more, no less. The mission is accomplished by living inside individual heartbeats, breaths, blinks and twitches, draining the mind of time’s pull in order to achieve a floating, endless symbiosis with the body’s own processes. It becomes pure calculus: the motion of the body is X and the task the derivative, stretched over time, product of infinite moments. The mind is the only tangent, if allowed to wander. Task and purpose. “Jenny rolls her eyes. “‘They taught you to reroute your ability to feel,’ Dennis says. ‘You’ve been short-circuited.‘“ (Source Link)

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“The Lying Game,” by Joe Hagan and Sara Nelson from

“Mafia requires all the skills natural to any self-respecting New York climber: deception, treachery, guile—and a high tolerance for acute social paranoia. A Russian psychologist claims to have invented it in the 1980’s, to show how an informed minority (the ‘mafia’) power-play against an uninformed majority (the ‘village’)[…] In New York, it’s a perfect game for the moment: In a city rife with paranoia, ambitious sharpies can draw together for some good old-fashioned human contact without compromising their sense of themselves as ambitious New York sharpies. ‘You can scream at people, you can lie to them,’ raved 30-year-old Lila Bezerra[…] ‘It’s like letting the animals loose. To get people to believe you when you know you’re lying—it’s a dirty little game.‘“ (Source Link)

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Muskrat pelts in prime condition are worth about

Muskrat pelts in prime condition are worth about four dollars, twice what they went for a decade ago. Between 150,000 and 200,000 muskrats were trapped in New York State during each of the last five years, down from about a half million annually during the early Eighties.

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600 million pairs of sho

600 million pairs of shoes are sold annually by the Japanese shoe industry. Retailers update most lines four to six times a year.

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Laze, a contraction of “lava haze,”

Laze, a contraction of “lava haze,” is a word for gases, including steam and hydrochloric acid, formed by lava hitting sea water.

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