And Alatar ignored Pallando's warnings yet again, and opened the first McDonald's; and so another cult began. And Pallando wept; and stood alone upon the parking lot, and called to the West, and said, 'O great Powers! Can even the sorrows of Nienna grant us pity for this evil deed?'; and he threw himself upon the pavement. Yet from the West there came no reply
progress has achieved wonderful things, too. Paving. Asphalt. Smog. Car alarms that wake you up in the middle of the fucking night. Carcinogenic food. The Exxon Valdez. That stereo in the apartment upstairs. Hydrogen bombs. Hormone-injected meat. Artificial coloring. Alarm clocks (and a society so dependent on measured time that we need alarm clocks). Television, and a society that has replaced "How can we improve the human condition?" with "Hey, did'ja see the Simpsons last night? Huh huh". An Internet where people like us can waste away their free time instead of going out and having a life. Yeah! Progress! I love it! Get me the genetic splicing kit! I want to make a new kind of trout!
"Woo woo woo! Look at them legs!" the fresh maple leaves shouted. The cloth catnip mouse was offended, but said nothing. She had long been exposed to that kind of behaviour from deciduous plants. "I'll be glad to get home," she thought to herself. "I'm hungry, and at least Finky will treat me with some respect." She reached 44th Street and entered her building where Adolfo, the bumble-ball doorman, was on duty. He rose unsteadily and nodded to her. Next to his chair was a nearly-empty bottle of kaopectate. "'S' nothin'," he lisped drunkenly. "Jus' a little shot t' hold me until I getta break." She said nothing and, avoiding his gaze, quickly went inside. The elevator arrived at her floor and she dashed into their small apartment. To her surprise she saw the familiar large plastic penguin standing in the doorway to the kitchen, naked, holding a dozen roofing nails in one flipper and a birthday cake, with candles, in the other. "Finky!" she laughed. "You remembered!" "Happy birthday, Sheiloo, my favorite little cloth catnip mouse," Finky replied. After a leisurely candlelit dinner of cake and roofing nails, the two giggled and retired to the bedroom
"Accio Jensen index!" Harry cried, pointing his wand at the maintenance margin requirement. If he could just prevent Voldemort from off-balance-sheeting a little longer, he knew Hermione would come through with the EAMS differential disclosure. But Voldemort's equity was powerful, even with Dumbledore's setting value date on the Eurodollar; his random-walk didn't seem so random, and Harry was sure that even with translation exposure he could paper over his losses. "Autoregressive kedavra!" Voldemort snarled with a sudden fiduciary. Harry leaped aside, nearly forced to sell at a dirty price. If he hadn't set his global bonds to Market-if-touched he would have been forced into liquidity