Kemur út í kvöld.
Enn ein kvöldvaktin fyrir mig á eftir. Mikið er ég orðinn þreyttur á þeim.
-b.
[Seldist í rúmlega 113.000 eintökum fyrstu 'vikuna'. Fokkjess!]
A dying decleration, the lawyers call it - admissible evidence in a Maryland courtroom if the victim is informed by a competent medical personnel that he is dying or otherwise indicates that he believes himself to be dying. And while it's not uncommon for homicide victims to make dying declarations, it is a rare and special moment when those utterances are at all helpful to a detective, not to mention relevant.
Every homicide detective has a favourite story involving a murdered man's last words. Many of these tales center on the code of the street and its observance even at life's end. One involves the last moments of a West Baltimore doper, who was still talking when the officers arrived.
"Who shot you?"
"I'll tell you in a minute," the victim declared, presumably unaware that he had about forty seconds left to live.
Having suffered deep stab wounds to the chest and face, one dying man claimed to have cut himself shaving. Another victim, shot five times in the chest and back, assured officers with his last breath that he would take care of the problem himself.
But perhaps the most classic dying declaration story belongs to Bob McAllister. Back in '82, during his first weeks as a homicide detective, Mac had worked a long detail case with other detectives and had been secondary on a few calls, but otherwise he was pretty green. In the hope that he'd learn from a veteran, they paired him with Jake "the Snake" Coleman, alias the Polyester Prince, a gravel-voiced, bantamweight detective of legendary proportions. And so, when the call came for a shooting on Pennsylvania Avenue, Jake Coleman was out the door with McAllister in tow.
The dead man at Pennsie and Gold was named Frank Gupton. McAllister can remember the name without hesitation; he also remembers that the case is still as open as the day is long.
"He was alive when we got there," said the first officer at the scene.
"Oh yeah?" said Coleman, encouraged.
"Yeah. We asked him who shot him."
"And?"
"He said, 'Fuck you.' "
9. "If you're having car trouble, you're in the wrong place."
The days of the local gas station staffed with a skilled mechanic have all but come to an end. Station owners are swapping car lifts for beverage cases and car washes, anything that brings in a high-volume stream of income and traffic, says Dennis DeCota, executive director of the California Service Station and Automotive Repair Association. The more people who pull over for a soda, the greater the chance they'll top off their tank and vice versa, the thinking goes. Few owners want the hassle of a business like car repair even if it earns the same amount of money as a convenience store.
In addition, repairing cars is increasingly expensive, and the ill will and potential liability from a fix-it job gone wrong are more of a headache than many owners are willing to risk. Today a service station can require $100,000 worth of diagnostic equipment, a significant investment. It's a risky venture with little payoff, says Southern California station owner Arabshahi. In fact, Arabshahi removed the service station from one of his locations after he bought it. "I don't have a service station because I am not a mechanic," he says. "If he messes up a job, then it's my name on there."
No profession is as sterile as that of literature. Yet pretense is so valuable in the world that with its aid even literature becomes edifying. Pretense is the soul, so to speak, of the social life and is an art without which no other art of faculty, considered according to its effects on the human mind, can be perfect. Consider the fortunes of two persons, one of true value in every way, the other of false value. You will find that the latter is more fortunate than the former; indeed the false one is usually fortunate, the true one unfortunate. Pretense makes an effect even if truth be lacking, but truth without pretense can do nothing. Nor does this arise, I think, from our evil inclinations, but because bare truth is always an impoverished thing, and hence if we would delight or move men we must use illusion and heightening, and promise more and better than we can give. Nature herself is an impostor with man, and renders his life likeable and bearable chiefly by means of imagination and illusion.
He talks of San Francisco, he's from Hunter's Bar
I don't quite know the distance
But I'm sure that's far
Yeah I'm sure that's pretty far
And yeah, I'd love to tell you all my problem
You're not from New York City, you're from Rotherham
So get off the bandwagon, and put down the handbook
Yeah, yeah, yeah
And she won't be surprised, no she won't be shocked
When she's pressed the star after she's pressed unlock
And there's verse and chapter sat in her inbox
And all that it says is that you've drank a lot
Follow the advice of my grandmother, who said: ,,Stab first."
..I don't know the second part, because I stabbed her.
I think the game shows a great sense of Gnostic fatalism. The snake is constantly in motion, unable to stop or even slow down. There are only three options: the snake can crash into the walls or itself (Game Over); it can perpetually avoid the apple (playing while avoiding racking up any points); or it can grab the apple only to have another and another instantly appear (the game proper). The first is choosing death. The second Lacan would call the drive avoiding the lure of the object-cause of desire: basically asceticism. The third is what Lacan would identify as the metonymic structure of desire, basically the fact that we never want something, but always something else.