http://www.e-reading.org.ua/bookreader.php/80261/King_-_The_Stand.html
Stephen King
The Stand - The Complete & Uncut Edition
Chapter 1
Hapscomb’s Texaco sat on Number 93 just north of Arnette, a pissant four-street burg about 110 miles from Houston. Tonight the regulars were there, sitting by the cash register, drinking beer, talking idly, watching the bugs fly into the big lighted sign.
It was Bill Hapscomb’s station, so the others deferred to him even though he was a pure fool. They would have expected the same deferral if they had been gathered together in one of their business establishments. Except they had none. In Arnette, it was hard times. In 1980 the town had had two industries, a factory that made paper products (for picnics and barbecues, mostly) and a plant that made electronic calculators. Now the paper factory was shut down and the calculator plant was ailing—they could make them a lot cheaper in Taiwan, it turned out, just like those portable TVs and transistor radios.
Norman Bruett and Tommy Wannamaker, who had both worked in the paper factory, were on relief, having run out of unemployment some time ago. Henry Carmichael and Stu Redman both worked at the calculator plant but rarely got more than thirty hours a week. Victor Palfrey was retired and smoked stinking home-rolled cigarettes, which were all he could afford.
“Now what I say is this,” Hap told them, putting his hands on his knees and leaning forward. “They just gotta say screw this inflation shit. Screw this national debt shit. We got the presses and we got the paper. We’re gonna run off fifty million thousand-dollar bills and hump them right the Christ into circulation.”
Palfrey, who had been a machinist until 1984, was the only one present with sufficient self-respect to point out Hap’s most obvious damfool statements. Now, rolling another of his shitty-smelling cigarettes, he said: “That wouldn’t get us nowhere. If they do that, it’ll be just like Richmond in the last two years of the States War. In those days, when you wanted a piece of gingerbread, you gave the baker a Confederate dollar, he’d put it on the gingerbread, and cut out a piece just that size. Money’s just paper, you know.”
“I know some people don’t agree with you,” Hap said sourly. He picked up a greasy red plastic paper-holder from his desk. “I owe these people. And they’re starting to get pretty itchy about it.”
Stuart Redman, who was perhaps the quietest man in Arnette, was sitting in one of the cracked plastic Woolco chairs, a can of Pabst in his hand, looking out the big service station window at Number 93. Stu knew about poor. He had grown up that way right here in town, the son of a dentist who had died when Stu was seven, leaving his wife and two other children besides Stu.
His mother had gotten work at the Red Ball Truck Stop just outside of Arnette—Stu could have seen it from where he sat right now if it hadn’t burned down in 1979. It had been enough to keep the four of them eating, but that was all. At the age of nine, Stu had gone to work, first for Rog Tucker, who owned the Red Ball, helping to unload trucks after school for thirty-five cents an hour, and then at the stockyards in the neighboring town of Braintree, lying about his age to get twenty backbreaking hours of labor a week at the minimum wage.
Now, listening to Hap and Vic Palfrey argue on about money and the mysterious way it had of drying up, he thought about the way his hands had bled at first from pulling the endless handtrucks of hides and guts. He had tried to keep that from his mother, but she had seen, less than a week after he started. She wept over them a little, and she hadn’t been a woman who wept easily. But she hadn’t asked him to quit the job. She knew what the situation was. She was a realist.
Some of the silence in him came from the fact that he had never had friends, or the time for them. There was school, and there was work. His youngest brother, Dev, had died of pneumonia the year he began at the yards, and Stu had never quite gotten over that. Guilt, he supposed. He had loved Dev the best… but his passing had also meant there was one less mouth to feed.
JOURNAL ARCHIVE: - posted by H.V.O.M - Kerry Wayne Burgess 11:03 PM Pacific Time Spokane Valley Washington USA Monday 13 June 2016 - http://hvom.blogspot.com/2016/06/beer-30.html
Even here on the east side of the state, in this area that, as I wrote before, doesn't seem able to decide if it is prospering or dying.
[JOURNAL ARCHIVE 13 June 2016 excerpt ends]
http://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/movie_script.php?movie=transcendence
Springfield! Springfield!
Transcendence (2014)
And by the time you and I are done talking, we'll own this diner.
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JOURNAL ARCHIVE: 03/30/07 3:08 AM
A very detailed dream about being on a Luge course at an Olympic competition. I can remember that I made two timed runs through the course. I can remember very clearly the first part of the course going down a large hill and going very fast. But the weird part is that I was going backwards and that I had to make a 90-degree turn about half-way through the course, which was very tricky. There was a wall there at the turn that I would have hit if I hadn't got it right. I can remember making course adjustment to my sled as I was traveling backwards and approaching the turn that would be to my left as my back was to it and it was a turn that I couldn't even actually see. I can remember that my time was in the range of 13-something, which I guess means the course took me over 13 minutes. I had no idea if that was good enough time to earn a gold medal. Then I was back at the course start I guess to make a third run. But I didn't see any point to it so I went into some kind of nearby building to return my sled. But at that point, my sled was some kind of copper-colored rocket. There were three people in the room and one was Thedia. Another was a woman I remember as Donna, who was friend of Thedia's when we lived in that rented house on Dequincy in De Queen. I don't know who was the 3rd person as he was talking to Donna and had his back to me. I went back outside to make my third and final run and I remember that Donna was announcing my name over the PA but she kept getting my middle name wrong. First she called me Kerry Abner Burgess and then she called me Kerry Charlie Burgess, and she was saying something else but I think at the end, she just like the mike open and wasn't saying anything. I was at the start of the Luge course while she was talking and I was configuring my sled but now it included a chair from a kitchen table. It seemed that the chair would drag behind me on ropes. Instead of having the chair with its back flat to the ice while the legs were horizontal to the ice, the back of the chair was vertical to the ice while the legs were horizontal to the ice. Throughtout the dream, I have the indescribable sense of the blue sky, which I can almost visualize and which I could seen parts of the horizon of the sky and their is some indescribable notion connected to that visualization about jet aircraft.
[JOURNAL ARCHIVE 30 March 2007 excerpt ends]
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http://www.e-reading.org.ua/bookreader.php/80261/King_-_The_Stand.html
Stephen King
The Stand - The Complete & Uncut Edition
Chapter 1
As Vic and Hap chewed it out, there was still a little dusk left in the sky, but the land was in shadow. Cars didn’t go by on 93 much now, which was one reason that Hap had so many unpaid bills. But there was a car coming now, Stu saw.
It was still a quarter of a mile distant, the day’s last light putting a dusty shine on what little chrome was left to it. Stu’s eyes were sharp, and he made it as a very old Chevrolet, maybe a ‘75. A Chevy, no lights on, doing no more than fifteen miles an hour, weaving all over the road. No one had seen it yet but him.
“Now let’s say you got a mortgage payment on this station,” Vic was saying, “and let’s say it’s fifty dollars a month.”
“It’s a hell of a lot more than that.”
“Well, for the sake of the argument, let’s say fifty. And let’s say the Federals went ahead and printed you a whole carload of money. Well then those bank people would turn round and want a hundred and fifty. You’d be just as poorly off.”
“That’s right,” Henry Carmichael added. Hap looked at him, irritated. He happened to know that Hank had gotten in the habit of taking Cokes out of the machine without paying the deposit, and furthermore, Hank knew he knew, and if Hank wanted to come in on any side it ought to be his.
“That ain’t necessarily how it would be,” Hap said weightily from the depths of his ninth-grade education. He went on to explain why.
Stu, who only understood that they were in a hell of a pinch, tuned Hap’s voice down to a meaningless drone and watched the Chevy pitch and yaw its way on up the road. The way it was going Stu didn’t think it was going to make it much farther. It crossed the white line and its lefthand tires spurned up dust from the left shoulder. Now it lurched back, held its own lane briefly, then nearly pitched off into the ditch. Then, as if the driver had picked out the big lighted Texaco station sign as a beacon, it arrowed toward the tarmac like a projectile whose velocity is very nearly spent. Stu could hear the worn-out thump of its engine now, the steady gurgle-and-wheeze of a dying carb and a loose set of valves. It missed the lower entrance and bumped up over the curb. The fluorescent bars over the pumps were reflecting off the Chevy’s dirt-streaked windshield so it was hard to see what was inside, but Stu saw the vague shape of the driver roll loosely with the bump. The car showed no sign of slowing from its relentless fifteen.
“So I say with more money in circulation you’d be—”
“Better turn off your pumps, Hap,” Stu said mildly.
“The pumps? What?”
Norm Bruett had turned to look out the window. “Christ on a pony,” he said.
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https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Battlestar_Galactica_(2003)
Wikiquote
Battlestar Galactica (2003)
Sometimes a Great Notion [4.13]
[Starbuck and Leoben just found a crashed Viper, where she sees a corpse looking like her]
Starbuck: If you've got an explanation for this, now's the time.
Leoben: I don't have one. I was wrong...about Earth.
Kara: Your Hybrid told me something. Said that I was the harbinger of death, that I would lead us all to our end.
Leoben: She told you that? [Leoben runs away]
Starbuck: Is it true? Is it true?
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/predictions/multi_season/13_seasonal_outlooks/color/t.gif
- posted by H.V.O.M - Kerry Wayne Burgess 9:40 PM Pacific Time Spokane Valley Washington USA Thursday 28 July 2016
