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From Zodiac by Neal Stephenson:
[Chapter 2, p. 14-15]
[Chapter 2, p. 18]
"You got a light on that thing?"
I laughed. "Since when are you the type to worry about that?"
"It's dangerous, man. You're invisible."
"I just assume I'm not invisible. I assume I'm wearing fluorescent clothes, and there's a million-dollar bounty going to the first driver who manages to hit me. And I ride on that assumption."
[Chapter 5, p. 38-39]
"Sabotaging a hazardous-waste pipeline."
I looked at her.
"Honest to God. That's actually a crime in New Jersey. I do not make this up," she said.
"Why do you think they'll drop the charges?"
"Because that will force the company to go into court and testify that this pipeline is carrying hazardous waste. Otherwise, it's not a hazardous-waste pipeline, is it?"
[Chapter 11, p. 81-82]
He sniffed the air and frowned slightly. Bartholemew was a sommelier of heavy metal. "Yeah. Not bad for a two-umlaut band. [...]"
[Chapter 13, p. 98]
From Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson (Arrow Books, UK, 1999):
[Chapter Novis Ordo Seclorum, p. 27-28]
[...] Manilla is dead ahead of them, still veiled in haze. It is getting toward evening.
Then the haze dissolves, the atmosphere suddenly becomes as limpid as a child's eyes, and for about an hour they can see to infinity. They are steaming into an arena of immense thunderheads with lightning corkscrewing down through them all around. Flat grey clouds like shards of broken slate peek out between anvils. Behind them are higher clouds vaulting halfway to the moon, glowing pink and salmon in the light of the setting sun. Behind that, more clouds nestled within banks of humidity like Christmas ornaments wrapped in tissue paper, expanses of blue sky, more thunderheads exchanging bolts of lightning twenty miles long. Skies nested within skies nested within skies.
[Chapter Seaweed, p. 41-42]
[Chapter Forays, p. 61]
[Chapter Nightmare, p. 113]
The staircase that leads over the tracks to Utter Maurby Terminal is enclosed with roof and walls, forming a gigantic organ pipe that resonates with an infrasonic throb as it is pummeled by wind and water. As he walks into the lower end of the staircase, the storm is suddenly peeled away from his face and he is able to stand there for a moment and give this phenom the full appreciation it deserves.
[...] Waterhouse first sees Outer Qwghlm through a scupper. He doesn't even know what a scupper is, except a modality of vomiting. The ferry crew gave him and the other half-dozen passengers detailed vomiting instructions before they fought past the Utter Maurby breakwater, the salient point being that it you leaned over me rail, you would almost certainly be swept overboard. Much better to get down on all fours and aim at a scupper. But half the time when Waterhouse peers down one of these, he sees not water but some distant point on the horizon, or seagulls chasing the ferry, or the distinctive three-pronged silhouette of Outer Qwghlm.
[Scupper: (n) an opening cut through the bulwarks of a ship so that water falling on deck may flow overboard]
[Chapter The Castle, p. 229-232]
The sultan has an Oxford English accent with traces of garlic and red pepper still wedged in its teeth. He speaks for about fifteen minutes.
The room contains a few dozen living human bodies, each one a big sack of guts and fluids so highly compressed that it will squirt for a few yards when pierced. Each one is built around an armature of 206 bones connected to each other by notoriously fault-prone joints that are given to obnoxious creaking, grinding, and popping noises when they are in other than pristine condition. This structure is draped with throbbing steak, inflated with clenching air sacks, and pierced by a Gordian sewer filling with burbling acid and compressed gas and asquirt with vile enzymes and solvents produced by the many dark, gamy nuggets of genetically programmed meat strung along its length. Slugs of dissolving food are forced down this sloppy labyrinth by serialized convulsions, decaying into gas, liquid, and solid matter which must all be regularly vented to the outside world lest the owner go toxic and drop dead. Spherical, gel-packed cameras swivel in mucus-greased ball joints. Infinite phalanxes of cilia beat back invading particles, encapsulate them in goo for later disposal. In each body a centrally located muscle flails away at an eternal, circulating torrent of pressurized gravy. And yet, despite all of this, not one of these bodies makes a single sound at any time during the sultan's speech. It is a marvel that can only be explained by the power of brain over body, and, in turn, by the power of cultural conditioning over the brain.
[Chapter Sultan, p. 315-316]
"I've been playing chess with a fellow named Donald Michie -- a classicist," Alan [Turing] says. "I am wretched at it. But man has always constructed tools to extend his powers-why not a machine that will help me play chess?"
"Does Donald Michie get to have one, too?"
"He can design his own machine!" Alan says indignantly.
[Chapter Antaeus, p. 341]
[Chapter Antaeus, p. 346]
[Chapter Crunch, p. 482]
[Chapter Hoard, p. 509]
[...] Many Filipinos are, racially, almost pure Chinese even though their families have been living here for centuries. Perhaps this explained strongly Asian features of our travelling companions and (I now had to presume) business partners. [...]
Proverbial ice was broken as one consequence of pig truck incident which occurred on four-lane highway, narrowed by construction to two, leading N from Manila. Casual obsvn. of Filipino swine suggests that their ludicrous, pink, tabloid-sized ears function as heat exchangers, as do, e.g., the tongues of dogs. They are transported in vehicles consisting of big cage constructed on bed of a straight (as opposed to semiarticulated) truck. Construction of such vehicles appears to tax local resources to the point where they are only economical when maximum conceivable number of swine are packed into confines at all times. Heat buildup ensues. Pigs adapt by fighting their way to perimeter of cage & hanging ear/heat exchangers out over the side to flap in the wind of the truck's motion.
The appearance of such a vehicle when approached from behind can be easily envisioned without further description. Readers who devote a few moments' consideration to the subject of excreta need not be pounded over the head vis-a-vis what flies, sprays, drips, etc. from such vehicles either. The Pig Truck Incident was a humorous demonstration of applied hydrodynamics, though since no actual water was involved perhaps "excretodynamics" or "scatodynamics" might better fit. THE GRACE OF GOD had been following a representative Pig Truck for some miles in the hopes of passing it. The sheer quantity of excess body heat radiating from its vast phased array of flapping pink ears caused several of our drinking-water bottles to achieve full rolling boil and explode. Bong-Bong Gad maintained a respectful distance because of excreta hazards, which in no way simplified the problem of passing the truck. Tension climbed to a palpable level & Bong-Bong was subjected to steadily increasing stream of good-natured heckling and unsolicited driving advice from passenger area, esp. from DMS who viewed lingering unwelcome presence of pig truck in our planned trajectory as personal affront & hence challenge to be overcome w/all due pluck, vigor, can-do spirit, & other qualities known to be possessed in abundance by DMS.
After some time Bong-Bong made his move, using one hand to manipulate steering wheel and other to time-share equally important responsibilities of shifting gears and depressing the horn button. As we drew alongside the Pig Truck (which was on my side of the jeepney) the Truck slalomed toward us as if perhaps swerving around some real or imagined roadside hazard. The primary horn of THE GRACE OF GOD was apparently going unheard, possibly because it was competing for audio bandwidth against large numbers of swine voicing their displeasure in same frequency range. With aplomb normally seen only among senescent English butlers, Bong-Bong reached up with his horn/gear-shift hand and gripped a brilliant stainless-steel chain flailing from ceiling of cab with a stainless-steel crucifix on the end of it and jerked downwards, energizing the secondary, tertiary, and quaternary honking systems: a trio of tuba-sized stainless-steel horns mounted to the roof of THE GRACE OF GOD and collectively drawing so much power that our vehicle's speed dropped by (I would estimate) ten km/hr as its energies were diverted into decibel production. A demi-hyperbolic swath of agricultural crops twenty miles long was flattened to the ground by the blast, and, hundreds of miles north, the Taiwanese government, its collective ears still ringing, filed a diplomatic protest with the Philippine ambassador. Dead whales and dolphins washed ashore on the beaches of Luzon for days, and sonar operators in passing U.S. Navy submarines were sent into early retirement with blood streaming from their ears.
Terrified by this sound, all of the pigs (I would suppose) voided their bowels just as the driver of the Pig Truck swerved violently away from us. Certain first-year-physics conservation-of-momentum issues dictated that I be showered with former pig bowel contents in order to enhance shareholder value. This was evidently the funniest thing that the two Asian-looking gentlemen had ever seen, and rendered them helpless for several minutes. One of them actually retched from laughing too hard (the first time that our vehicle's lack of windows came in handy). The other extended his hand and introduced himself [...]
[Chapter Hoard, p. 512-517]
We then covered an amount of distance equivalent, in terms of Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt, to one more Lewis And Clark Expedition Day, a convenient unit of distance, danger, perspirational weight loss, poor sphincter control , wishing you were at home, exasperation, & emotional toll which I will hereinafter abbreviate as LAC. So after 1 LAC we arrived at another roadblock similar to the first [...]
Three days' excruciatingly slow travel, comprising maybe another 10 LACs, awaited us. [...]
[Chapter Hoard, p. 519-523]
"Huh," Shaftoe says, "how does that square with your being a celibate monk or priest or whatever you supposedly are?"
Root says, "I'm supposed to be celibate --"
"But you're not," Shaftoe reminds him.
"But God's forgiveness is infinite," Root fires back, winning the point. "So, as I was saying, I'm supposed to be celibate -- but that doesn't mean I can't get married. As long as I don't consummate the marriage."
"But if you don't consummate it, it doesn't count!"
"But the only person, besides me, who will know that we didn't consummate it, is Julieta."
"God will know," Shaftoe says.
"God doesn't issue passports," Root says.
[Chapter Rocket, p. 538]
The RAAF fellow shouts at him (because the music has started again): "Where'd you learn to talk like that?"
Waterhouse doesn't know where to begin; God forbid he should offend these people again. But he doesn't have to. The RAAF guy screws up his face in disgust, as if he had just noticed a six-foot tapeworm trying to escape from Waterhouse's throat. "Outer Qwghlm?" he asks.
Waterhouse nods. The confused and shocked faces before him collapse into graven masks. Inner Qwghlmians! Of course! [...]
The RAAF chap forces himself to smile [...] "With us," he explains brightly, "what you just said isn't a polite greeting."
"Oh," Waterhouse says, "what did I say, then?"
"You said that while you were down at the mill to lodge a complaint about a sack with a weak seam that sprung loose on Thursday, you were led to understand, by the tone of the proprietor's voice, that Mary's great-aunt, a spinster who had a loose reputation as a younger woman, had contracted a fungal infection in her toenails."
There is a long silence. Then everyone speaks at once. Finally a woman's voice breaks through the cacophony: "No, no!" Waterhouse looks; it's Mary. "I understood him to say that it was at the pub, and that he was there to apply for a job catching rats, and that it was my neighbor's dog that had come down with rabies."
"He was at the basilica for confession -- the priest -- angina --" someone shouts from the back. Then everyone talks at once: "The dockside -- Mary's half-sister -- leprosy -- Wednesday -- complaining about a loud party!"
[...] "How's it working out?"
Rod shrugs. "So-so. Qwghlmian is a very pithy language. Bears no relationship to English or Celtic -- its closest relatives are !Qnd, which is spoken by a tribe of pygmies in Madagascar, and Aleut. Anyway, the pithier, the better, right?"
"By all means," Waterhouse says. "Less redundancy -- harder to break the code."
"Problem is, if it's not exactly a dead language, then it's lying on a litter with a priest standing over it making the sign of the cross. You know?"
Waterhouse nods.
"So everyone hears it a little differently. Like just now -- they heard your Outer Qwghlmian accent, and assumed you were delivering an insult. But I could tell you were saying that you believed, based on a rumor you heard last Tuesday in the meat market, that Mary was convalescing normally and would be back on her feet within a week."
"I was trying to say that she looked beautiful," Waterhouse protests.
"Ah!" Rod says. "Then you should have said, 'Gxnn bhldh sqrd m' !"
"That's what I said!"
"No, you confused the mid-glottal with the frontal glottal," Rod says.
"Honestly," Waterhouse says, "can you tell them apart over a noisy radio?"
"No," Rod days. "On the radio, we stick to the basics [...]"
[Chapter Courting, p. 550-553]
"Has she been communicating with you?"
"In the course of twenty minutes' phone conversation, she has deeply and eternally bonded with Kia," Avi says.
"I would believe that without hesitation."
"It wasn't even like they got to know each other. It was like they knew each other in a previous life and had just gotten back in touch."
"Yeah. So?"
"Kia now feels bound by duty and honor to present a united front with America Shaftoe."
"It all hangs together," Randy says.
"Acting sort of like Amy's emotional agent or lawyer, she has made it clear to me that we, Epiphyte Corporation, owe Amy our full attention and concern."
"And what does Amy want?"
"That was my question," Avi says, "and I was made to feel very bad for asking it. Whatever it is that we -- that is, you -- owe to Amy is something so obvious that merely manifesting a need to verbalize it is ... just ... really ..."
"Shabby. Insensitive."
"Coarse. Brutish."
"A really transparent, toddler-level exercise in the cheapest kind of, of ..."
"Of evasion of personal responsibility for one's own gross misdeeds."
"Kia was rolling her eyes, I imagine. Her lip was sort of curled."
"She drew breath as if to give me a good piece of her mind but then thought better of it."
"Not because you're her boss. But because you would never understand."
"This is just one of those evils that has to be sort of accepted and allowed, by any mature woman who's been around the block."
"Who knows the harsh realities. Yeah," Randy says.
"Yup."
"Okay, you can tell Kia that her client's needs and demands have been communicated to the guilty party --"
"Have they?"
"Tell her that the fact that her client has needs and demands has been heavy-handedly insinuated to me and that it is understood that the ball in my court."
"And we can stand down to some kind of detente while a response prepared?"
"Certainly. Kia can return to her normal duties for the time being."
"Thank you, Randy."
[Chapter California, p. 566-567]
Waterhouse is going to fix the church's organ. [...]
[...] He is outraged and offended, after the service, when the powers that be are reluctant to let him, a total stranger and a Yank to boot, begin ripping off access panels and meddling with the inner workings of the organ. The minister is a good judge of character -- a little too good to suit Waterhouse. The organist (and hence ultimate authority on all matters organic) looks to have been shipped over here with the very first load of convicts after having been convicted, in the Old Bailey, of talking too loud, bumping into things, not tying his shoelaces properly, and having dandruff so in excess of Society's unwritten standards as to offend the dignity of the Queen and of the Empire.
It all leads to an unbearably tense and complicated meeting in a Sunday school classroom near the offices of the minister, who is called the Rev. Dr. John Mnrh. He is a stout red-faced chap who clearly would prefer to have his head in a tun of ale but who is putting up with all of this because it's good for his immortal soul.
This meeting essentially becomes a venue within which the organist, Mr. Drkh, can vent his opinions on the sneakiness of the Japanese, why the invention of the well-tempered tuning system was a bad idea and how all music written since has been a shabby compromise, the sterling qualities of the General, the numerological significance of the lengths of various organ pipes, how the excessive libido of American troops might be controlled with certain dietary supplements, how the hauntingly beautiful modes of traditional Qwghlmian music are particularly ill-suited to the well-tempered tuning system, how the king's dodgy Germanic relatives are plotting to take over the Empire and turn it over to Hitler, and, first and foremost, that Johann Sebastian Bach was a bad musician, a worse composer, an evil man, a philanderer, and the figurehead of a worldwide conspiracy, headquartered in Germany, that has been slowly taking over the world for the last several hundred years, using the well-tempered tuning system as a sort of carrier frequency on which its ideas (which originate with the Bavarian illuminati) can be broadcast into the minds of everyone who listens to music -- especially the music of Bach. And -- by the way -- how this conspiracy may best be fought off by playing and listening to traditional Qwghlmian music, which, in case Mr. Drkh didn't make this perfectly clear, is wholly incompatible with well-tempered tuning because of its haunting and beautiful, but numerologically perfect, scale.
"Your thoughts on numerology are most interesting," Waterhouse says loudly, running Mr. Drkh off the rhetorical road. "I myself studied with Drs. Turing and von Neumann at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton."
Father John snaps awake, and Mr. Drkh looks as if he's just taken a fifty-caliber round in the small of his back. Clearly, Mr. Drkh has had a long career of being the weirdest person in any given room, but he's about to go down in flames.
In general, Waterhouse isn't good at just winging it, but [...] he mounts the podium, dives for a round of chalk, and starts hammering equations onto the blackboard like an ack-ack gun. He uses well-tempered tuning as a starting point, takes off from there into the deepest realms of advanced number theory, circles back all of a sudden to the Qwghlmian modal scale, just to keep them on their toes, and then goes screaming straight back into number theory again. In the process, he actually stumbles across some interesting material that he doesn't think has been covered in the literature yet, and so he diverts from strict bullshitting for a few minutes to explore this thing and actually prove something that he thinks could probably be published in a mathematical journal, if he just gets around to typing it up properly. [...]
Finally, he turns around, for the first time since he started. Father John and Mr. Drkh are bath dumbfounded.
[Chapter Organ, p. 573-575]
"Whereas women can't?"
"I suppose women can. They rarely seem to want to. What I'm characterizing here, as the female approach, is essentially saner and healthier."
"Hmmmm.
"See, you are being a little paranoid here and focusing on the negative too much. It's not about how women are deficient. It's more about how men are deficient. Our social deficiencies, lack of perspective, or whatever you want to call it, is what enables us to study one species of dragonfly for twenty years, or sit in front of a computer for a hundred hours a week writing code. This is not the behaviour of a well-balanced and healthy person, but it can obviously lead to great advances in synthetic fibers. Or whatever."
"But you said that you yourself were not very focused."
"Compared to other men in my family, that's true. So, I know a little about astronomy, a lot about computers, a little about business, and I have, if I may say so, a slightly higher level of social functioning than the others. Or maybe it's not even functioning, just an acute awareness of when I'm not functioning, so that I at least know when to feel embarrassed."
Amy laughs. "You're definitely good at that. It seems like you sort of lurch from one moment of feeling embarrassed to the next."
Randy gets embarrassed.
"It's fun to watch," Amy says encouragingly. "It speaks well of you."
"What I'm saying is that this does set me apart. One of the most frightening things about your true nerd, for many people, is not that he's socially inept -- because everybody's been there -- but rather his complete lack of embarrassment about it."
"Which is still kind of pathetic."
"It was pathetic when they were in high school," Randy says. "Now it's something else. Something very different from pathetic."
"What, then?"
"I don't know. There is no word for it. You'll see."
[Chapter Seattle, p. 645-646]
[Chapter Seattle, p. 649]
Oral surgeons, it seemed, were not comfortable delving more than elbow-deep into a patient's head. They had been living in big houses and driving to work in Mercedes-Benz sedans long before Randy had dragged his sorry ass into their offices with his horrifying X-ray and they had absolutely nothing to gain by even attempting to remove these -- not so much wisdom teeth in the normal sense as apocalyptic portents from the Book of Revelations. The best way to remove these teeth was with a guillotine. None of these oral surgeons would even consider undertaking the extraction until Randy had signed a legal disclaimer ton thick to staple, something that almost had to come in a three-ring binder, the general import of which was that one of the normal consequences of the procedure was for the patient's head to end up floating in a jug of formaldehyde in a tourist trap just over the Mexican border. In this manner Randy wandered from one oral surgeon's office to another for a few weeks, like a teratomic outcast roving across a post-nuclear waste land being driven out of one village after another by the brickbats of wretched, terrified peasants. Until one day when he walked into an office and the nurse at the front desk almost seemed to expect him, and led him back into an exam room for a private consult with the oral surgeon, who was busy doing something in one of his little rooms that involved putting a lot of bone dust into the air. The nurse bade him sit down, proffered coffee, then turned on the light box and took Randy's X-ray, and stuck them up there. She took a step back, crossed her arms, and gazed at the pictures in wonder. "So," she murmured, "these are the famous wisdom teeth!"
[Chapter Wisdom, p. 777-778]
[Chapter Return, p. 873]
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