text:
Jack lay flat on his stomach not moving a muscle. Eyes widened and throat dry, his late night jog had now turned in to a terrifying ordeal.  The woods were dark , except for a few rays of light peering in from the moon above. Jack had ventured far from his regular path and was face to face with something fierce. Something unnatural. He had seen it when searching for a way back to the regular path. A thin, long figure, walking in between the trees. Its form mimicked that of the surrounding wood. Arms as long as light poles and legs as tall as cedars. When it spotted Jack it snapped to him immediately, emitting an unnerving bellow-like roar. It rang deep, shaking the very leaves from treetops. It's eye sockets glowed a dim yellow as if an old dusty lamp had been lit inside.

As Jack lay, he could hear it ambling towards him with a heavy step. Leaves and logs snapped with ease beneath its power. Jack's heart began to beat fast and he feared it would soon give out. Eventually it was upon him. He felt a warm air misting on to his neck from its' powerful labored breaths. Jack dare not look up. He hoped if he lay still it would walk away thinking he was dead. He was wrong. The thing shifted its' weight; its' body sounding like a moaning wooden bridge. His waist was grasped with a powerful grip and he was raised up high in the air to meet his pursuer. It's face was pasted with wooden bark and dried leaves. It ground, what appeared to be, its teeth back and forth; sap dripping out as if salivating over a fresh meal. Jack struggled to free himself but it was useless. He felt his waist cracking under the pressure of the tightening grip and felt he could take no more. "Help..Me!" he screamed gasping for air. This angered the creature and it clenched even tighter. Bones crunched and snapped somewhere in Jacks body but he couldn't exactly pinpoint where due to the immense pain and fear consuming him.Falling in and out of consciousness, Jack looked into the monsters stale gaze. There was no compassion or mercy in its' eyes. It was hungry and he was its' meal. Simple as that. His last thought before being consumed was short.

"I should..have bought a treadmill.."

title: Night Jog- ( this story wasn't "scaryshortstory "proof because of too many sentences in the second paragraph.)

question: Who is the main character of the story?

answer: Jack

question: Where is Jack when he encounters something unnatural?

answer: Jack had ventured far from his regular jogging path in the woods.

question: What was pursuing Jack in the woods?

answer: A giant, bone-crushing monster was after him.

question: What happens to Jack?

answer: Jack falls out of consciousness and is consumed by the monster.

question: Write a ~1 sentence summary.

answer: Jack ventures away from his regular jogging path in the woods at night and is consumed by a bone-crushing monster.


split: train

text:
In linguistics, an OBJECT is any of several types of arguments.[1] In subject-prominent, nominative-accusative languages such as English, a transitive verb typically distinguishes between its subject and any of its objects, which can include but are not limited to direct objects,[2] indirect objects,[3] and arguments of adpositions (prepositions or postpositions); the latter are more accurately termed oblique arguments, thus including other arguments not covered by core grammatical roles, such as those governed by case morphology (as in languages such as Latin) or relational nouns (as is typical for members of the Mesoamerican Linguistic Area). In ergative-absolutive languages, for example most Australian Aboriginal languages, the term “subject” is ambiguous, and thus the term “agent” is often used instead to contrast with “object”, such that basic word order is often spoken of in terms such as Agent-Object-Verb (AOV) instead of Subject-Object-Verb (SOV).[4] Topic-prominent languages, such as Mandarin, focus their grammars less on the subject-object or agent-object dichotomies but rather on the pragmatic dichotomy of topic and comment.[5]

Types

English

In English traditional grammar types, three types of object are acknowledged: _direct objects_, _indirect objects_, and _objects of prepositions_. These object types are illustrated in the following table:

  Type                    Example
  ----------------------- -----------------------
  Direct object           She sees _the dog_
  Indirect object         I gave _the man_ salt
  Object of preposition   You fish _for salmon_

Note that indirect objects are frequently expressed as objects of prepositions, complicating the traditional typology; e.g. “I gave salt _to the man_.”

Other languages

Some Chinese verbs can have two direct objects, one being more closely bound to the verb than the other; these may be called “inner” and “outer” objects.

Secundative languages lack a distinction between direct and indirect objects, but rather distinguish primary and secondary objects.[6] Many African languages fall into this typological category.[7]

Syntactic category

While the typical object is a pronoun, noun, or noun phrase, objects can also appear as other syntactic categories, as illustrated in the following table for the English language:

:::::{| class=“wikitable” |- ! Category !! Example |- | Noun (phrase) or pronoun || The girl ate FRUIT. |- | _that_-clause || We remembered THAT WE HAD TO BRING SOMETHING. |- | Bare clause || We remembered WE HAD TO BRING SOMETHING. |- | _for_-clause || We were waiting FOR HIM TO EXPLAIN. |- | Interrogative clause || They asked WHAT HAD HAPPENED. |- | Free relative clause || I heard WHAT YOU HEARD. |- | Gerund (phrase or clause) || He stopped ASKING QUESTIONS. |- | _to_-infinitive || Sam attempted TO LEAVE. |- | Cataphoric _it_ || I believe IT that she said that. |}

Identification

A number of criteria can be employed for identifying objects, e.g.:[8]

        1. Subject of passive sentence: Most objects in active sentences can become the subject in the corresponding passive sentences.[9]

        2. Position occupied: In languages with strict word order, the subject and the object tend to occupy set positions in unmarked declarative clauses. The object follows the subject.

        3. Morphological case: In languages that have case systems, objects are marked by certain cases (accusative, dative, genitive, instrumental, etc.).

Languages vary significantly with respect to these criteria. The first criterion identifies objects reliably most of the time in English, e.g.

        Fred gave me a book.
        a. A book was given (to) me.—Passive sentence identifies _a book_ as an object in the starting sentence.
        b. I was given a book.—Passive sentence identifies _me_ as an object in the starting sentence.

The second criterion is also a reliable criterion for analytic languages such as English, since the relatively strict word order of English usually positions the object after the verb(s) in declarative sentences. The third criterion is less applicable to English, though, since English lacks morphological case, exceptions being the personal pronouns (_I/me_, _we/us_, _he/him_, _she/her_, _they/them_). For languages that have case and relatively freer word order, morphological case is the most readily available criterion for identifying objects. In Latin and related languages, direct objects are usually marked with the accusative case, and indirect objects with the dative case. However, object marking may also follow non-syntactic rules, such as animacy. In Spanish, for example, human objects have to be marked by the preposition _a_ (as an example of differential object marking).

Verb classes

Verbs can be classified according to the number and/or type of objects that they do or do not take. The following table provides an overview of some of the various verb classes:[10]

:::::{| class=“wikitable” |- ! Transitive verbs !! Number of objects !! Examples |- | Monotransitive || One object || I FED the dog. |- | Ditransitive || Two objects || You LENT me a lawnmower. |- | Tritransitive || Three objects || I'll TRADE you this bicycle for your binoculars.[11] |- ! Intransitive verbs !! Semantic role of subject !! Examples |- | Unaccusative || Patient || The man STUMBLED twice, The roof COLLAPSED. |- | Unergative || Agent || He WORKS in the morning, They LIE often. |}

Ergative[12] and object-deletion verbs[13] can be transitive or intransitive, as indicated in the following table:

::::::::::{| class=“wikitable” |- ! Transitive !! Example |- | Ergative || The submarine SANK the freighter. |- | Object deletion || We have already EATEN dinner. |- ! Intransitive !! Example |- | Ergative || The freighter SANK. |- | Object deletion || We have already EATEN. |}

The distinction drawn here between ergative and object-deletion verbs is based on the role of the subject. The object of a transitive ergative verb is the subject of the corresponding intransitive ergative verb. With object-deletion verbs, in contrast, the subject is consistent regardless of whether an object is or is not present.

In sentence structure

Objects are distinguished from subjects in the syntactic trees that represent sentence structure. The subject appears (as high or) higher in the syntactic structure than the object. The following trees of a dependency grammar illustrate the hierarchical positions of subjects and objects:[14]

        [Grammatical objects]

The subject is in blue, and the object in orange. The subject is consistently a dependent of the finite verb, whereas the object is a dependent of the lowest non-finite verb if such a verb is present.

[1] For descriptions of the traditional distinction between subject and object, see for instance Freeborn (1995:31) and Kesner Bland (1996:415).

[2]

[3]

[4]

[5]

[6]

[7]

[8] See Biber et al. (1999:126) for a similar list of characteristics that identify (direct) objects.

[9] Concerning the passive as a diagnostic for identifying objects, see for instance Freeborn (1995:175) and Biber et al. (1999:126).

[10] For a classification of transitive verbs along the lines used here but using different terminology, see for instance Conner (1968:103ff.).

[11]  quoting

[12] Concerning ergative verbs, see for instance the Collins Cobuild English Grammar (1995:155f.) and Biber et al. (1999:155f.).

[13] The term _object-deletion verb_ is adopted from Biber et al. (1999:147). Such verbs are also called _ambitransitive_.

[14] Dependency trees similar to the ones produced here can be found in Ágel et al. (2003/6).

title: Object (grammar)

question: Give an example of an analytic language.

answer: English.

question: If a language doesn't have an object, what might it have to perform a similar role?

answer: An agent.

question: What most interests the grammar structure of Mandarin?

answer: Pragmatic dichotomy.

question: Using the English grammar concepts explained in this article, what is another way to say "A red car was given to Alice by Darla"?

answer: Darla gave Alice a red car.


text:
Updated: (Nov. 17, 2016): Today, the Florida Supreme Court issued the mandate and formally released its October 27, 2016 opinion vacating Clemente Aguirre’s conviction and death sentence, after the State declined to challenge the Court’s unanimous opinion from three weeks earlier.  Mr. Aguirre will soon be transferred off death row for the first time in over a decade, and will be returned to the county jail to await further proceedings. The Court’s decision means that Mr. Aguirre no longer stands convicted of any crime, and will again be presumed innocent unless and until he is proven guilty, should the State choose to retry him despite the new DNA evidence.

(Tallahassee, FL; October 27, 2016) – In a unanimous decision, the Florida Supreme Court today vacated the murder conviction of Clemente Aguirre based on new DNA evidence pointing to an alternate suspect. Aguirre has served 10 years on Florida’s death row for the 2004 murders of his neighbors Cheryl Williams and Carol Bareis.

In reaching its decision, the Florida Supreme Court ruled that the new DNA evidence coupled with confessions from Samantha Williams (the daughter and grand-daughter of the victims) to multiple individuals that she committed the murders so “substantially weakens the case against Aguirre” that the only “result is reasonable doubt as to Aguirre’s culpability.”

“We are grateful that the Court has recognized that the new DNA evidence entitles Mr. Aguirre to a new trial,” said Maria DeLiberato, an attorney with the Capital Collateral Regional Counsel–Middle Region in Tampa.  “Now that the Court has spoken so compellingly, we are hopeful that the prosecution will move quickly to release Mr. Aguirre and focus instead on prosecuting the person really responsible for this crime.”

In the initial hours after the bodies were discovered, police focused their investigation on Aguirre, an undocumented Honduran with no criminal record. Aguirre initially told police that he didn’t know anything about the murders. Later the same day, however, Aguirre asked to speak with police again and admitted that he had gone to the victims’ mobile home early that morning and had found the two women stabbed to death. He told police that after he discovered Williams’ body in the doorway of the mobile home, he checked her and Bareis for signs of life. He was afraid that the killer was still present, so he picked up the knife that was lying near Williams’s body, and then left the mobile home when he discovered that the killer was no longer in the home.

At trial, the prosecution presented the limited DNA evidence that had been tested to argue that Williams’ blood was on Aguirre’s clothes (which he voluntarily turned over to the police) and shoes, and that his fingerprint was on the knife. However, neither the prosecution nor the defense conducted testing on any of the more than 150 bloodstains that had been photographed and collected from the crime scene. Even though the evidence was consistent with Aguirre’s version of events, which he testified to at trial, he was convicted and sentenced to death.

In August 2011, Aguirre’s new counsel at the Capital Collateral Regional Counsel – Middle Region, in consultation with the Innocence Project, sought DNA testing of some of the previously untested evidence. _NONE_ of the DNA found on the 84 items that were tested matched Aguirre; most matched to the two victims, but two bloodstains were identified as coming from Williams’ daughter (Bareis’ granddaughter), Samantha Williams. Armed with this evidence, the legal team sought to test the remainder of the evidence. Again, _NONE_ of the newly tested stains showed Aguirre’s DNA, but another six were identified as Samantha’s.  Samantha’s eight bloodstains had been collected from four different rooms—including in the bathroom where the state had argued at trial that the killer would have cleaned up—and each was found inches away from the victims’ blood.

At evidentiary hearings in May 2013 and May 2015, Aguirre’s lawyers presented additional evidence that tended to inculpate Samantha, including testimony from a crime-scene expert that the bloodstains now known to be Samantha’s were “fresh” at the time they were photographed, and that the pattern of the bloodstains on Aguirre’s clothing show they could _not_ have been worn by the real killer. Attorneys introduced evidence that Samantha has confessed to the crimes on multiple occasions. Attorneys also presented evidence that Samantha and her mother had a troubled relationship and a heated argument the night of the murders.

At trial, Williams was a key witness against Aguirre claiming that she once woke up in the middle of the night to find Aguirre, who lived in the mobile home next door, standing over her bed. She also denied that her family owned a knife like the one used to commit the murder. In today’s ruling, the Florida Supreme Court wrote that the new DNA evidence and confessions by Williams “changes the focus entirely: No longer is Aguirre the creepy figure who appears over Samantha’s bed in the middle of the night; he is now the scapegoat for her crimes. Viewed through this lens, the DNA evidence tending to exculpate Aguirre but inculpate Samantha substantially weakens the case against Aguirre. And when the DNA evidence is considered together with Samantha’s numerous unequivocal confessions, the result is reasonable doubt as to Aguirre’s culpability.”

“Without the DNA evidence, there is a good likelihood that Mr. Aguirre would have already been put to death for a crime he didn’t commit,” said Nina Morrison, a senior staff attorney with the Innocence Project, which is affiliated with Cardozo School of Law. “We commend the Florida Supreme Court for acknowledging the extensive and powerful DNA evidence of Mr. Aguirre’s innocence.”

Attorneys from Bradley Arant Boult Cummings LLP wrote the appellate briefs for Aguirre, and one of the firm’s attorneys, Lindsey Boney, argued the appeal before the Florida Supreme Court. The case now goes back to the trial court for the prosecution to determine whether or not to retry the case. A copy of the court’s decision is available here.  Fourteen attorneys who served as prosecutors or government appellate attorneys had filed a friend-of-the-court brief urging the Florida Supreme Court to reverse Aguirre’s conviction based on the new evidence. A copy of that brief is available here.

Aguirre is represented by Maria DeLiberato and Julissa Fontan with the Capital Collateral Regional Counsel – Middle Region in Tampa; Kevin Newsom, Lindsey Boney, and Ashley Burkett of Bradley Arant Boult Cummings in Birmingham, AL; Marie-Louise Samuels Parmer of Tampa; and Nina Morrison and Barry Scheck of the Innocence Project.

question: Who is the person on death row wrongly accused of murdering two women?

answer: Clemente Aguirre

question: How long has Aguirre been in prison?

answer: Ten years

question: Why was his murder conviction vacated by the Florida Supreme Court?

answer: New DNA evidence and the confession from Samantha Williams (the daughter and granddaughter of the victims) to multiple individuals that she committed the murders.

question: Why was Aguirre the prime suspect in the double murder?

answer: He was the victim's neighbor. He found the dead bodies and checked them for signs of life. He also touched the knife out of fear that the killer was still in the house.

question: Write a ~3 sentence summary.

answer: According to the report, the Florida Supreme Court formally released its October 27, 2016 opinion vacating Clemente Aguirre's conviction and death sentence after the State declined to challenge the Court’s unanimous opinion from three weeks earlier. Aguirre spent 10 years on Florida's death row for the 2004 murders of his neighbors Cheryl Williams and Carol Bareis. New DNA evidence and the confession from Samantha Williams (the daughter and granddaughter of the victims) to multiple individuals that she committed the murders exonerated Aguirre of any wrongdoing.


text:
*Briiiing! Briiiiiing! Briiii--*
"Hello?", he said from the other end of the phone.
"Hi, Dave. It's Sarah," she said, without expression.
"Hey babe, good to hear from you. I wanted to call, but I've got no long distance minutes and you still haven't told me where I can send you a letter. I've missed you so much, University isn't what I thought it'd be."
"Yeah... I know what you mean. That's kind of what I wanted to talk about."
"Uh oh, I know that voice. What's wrong, babe?"
"Dave, I'm sorry, I really am," her voice cracked and she took a deep breath. "It's just, well, I thought I could do it Dave. I really did. We're only 3 hours away, but now that I'm here that seems like miles and miles..." Her voice trailed off and he could hear a sniffling noise in the receiver.
"Babe, it's fine, we knew it would be hard to stay together going into this. It'll be fine, no use getting worked up. My dad lives in St. Catherine's, remember? I'll be heading up to visit him anyways, we'll see each other lots. I love you babe, I miss you, too."
"Dave, that's not it. I'm really sorry, Dave. But... But I met somebody. In St. Catherine's."
"Oh." Dave's face went pale. He didn't know what to say, so he just let her drone on about how hard long distance relationships were and how he was bound to meet somebody in one of his classes or in his residence.
"I'm really sorry, Dave. They're not a student here, but I think something might actually start between us. I didn't want to do this over the phone, and nothing has happened yet, but I promised myself I would... I would break things off with you before anything did."
Dave could hear a muffled voice through the receiver. His heart sank. "He's there with you now, isn't he?"
"Yes, Dave. That's why I had to call, see? I had to contact you before anythi--"
*"Sarah, are you nearly finished in there?"*
Even though he hadn't heard it in nearly 3 months, Dave recognized the rumbling voice and he froze. "Dad?!"
"I'm sorry Dave, I've got to go."
"But Sarah! Wait! What is going on! Dad! How could yo--"
*Click.*

title: First attempt at flash fiction: Long Distance Relationship

question: Who is Dave?

answer: Dave is the man character. He is in a relationship with Sarah.

question: Who is Sarah?

answer: Sarah is the woman character. She is in a relationship with Dave.

question: Who did Sarah meet?

answer: Sarah says she met a new person that she wants to begin a relationship with, who in fact, turns out to be Dave's father.

question: Who is Sarah with?

answer: Sarah is with Dave's father.

question: Write a ~3 sentence summary.

answer: Dave calls Sarah, his girlfriend whom he is in a long distance relationship with. Sarah tells him that she wants to break up with him, as she's met someone new recently. Dave overhears a voice on Sarah's end, and realizes that it is his father.


text:
She was beautiful. Roger had to give her that. Her glistening chocolate hair draped over the supple curve of her breasts, framing an innocent, oval face. What's more, Vanessa was one of the highest ranked ballerinas in the country, so her body was tight and effortlessly graceful. And she was intelligent, a top student, loved by all her teachers. And she was passionate, voraciously tearing into cryptic Latin texts and twisted Shakespeare plays. And she was polite; she never misplaced a word or spoke ill of another in their presence. And finally, even in the face of this borderline perfection, she still managed humility.

But that's why Roger couldn't stand her. As she strutted from plebeian to plebeian pretending to commiserate with their inconveniences and chuckling hollowly at their awful jokes, you could sense her sentiment of superiority almost oozing through her skin, growing with each inferior she encountered. She only wasted her time with this mediocrity to vindicate her own accomplishments. Vanessa's act of humility was just that: an act.

It was certainly subtle. You had to look past her actions and question her motives. Why did she blush with every compliment? Why did she offer to help cute boys study? Why, when told she was smart, did she lightly assert that she'd never scored an A on a math test? Surely these are the signs of a humble, virtuous individual? Not when they're to garner attention and satiate her edacious ego.

When it came to guys, she never spoke first. That would make her seem desperate. Instead, she was to be so damn irresistible that cute boys would have to call her pretty and smart and beg for a date. Then she could giggle girlishly, lavishly deny their claims, and, after unctuously telling them how much she appreciated the offer, say no. That way, she'd always be desirable (guys want what they can't have, right?)

And it worked. Vanessa had plenty of top-notch suitors, but she never kissed a guy, probably never even went on a date. As she informed her friends, none had been worthy of her. She did, however, feel like the hottest shit on the planet. Guys sent her flowers, chocolates, poems, and snapchats and she flitfully played along, milking every last drop of attention from these doomed souls. If the stream of gifts dammed, she became irritated. Her teeth grinding together, her fingers fretfully crumbling her notebook paper, she would obsessively ponder how anyone could possibly not be attracted to her. She would question her own personal value (what if I'm not worthy of *him*?) and, awed by this young stud's ability to resist her, fall in love for the first time. But as soon as her subsequent batted eyelashes, slight smiles, and light laughs rekindled his fire, she, confidently returned to her throne of superiority, would dismiss her fleeting feelings and return to stringing him along, creating a vicious, inescapable cycle for the male whilst bolstering the ego of the female.

So what is a victim of this supposed cycle to do? In Roger's case, he will be content to silently and mercilessly judge her. Blood will gush angrily through his cheeks, adrenaline will force him to fidget and sweat, and his eyes will track her relentlessly across the room, but he will not utter a word. After all, no one can prove your error if you hide it and demonizing Vanessa is easier than accepting personal failure.

title: Hot and Haughty - 579 words (Brand new writer, any feedback would be greatly appreciated)

question: What makes Vanessa so special?

answer: She appears to be beautiful, smart, athletic, kind, and humble.

question: Why does Roger dislike Vanessa?

answer: He feels as though she is putting on an act for people and that her humility is a tools used to bolster her own ego. She strings men along, and when they donät show interest, she will manipulate them until they do, eventually leaving them hanging.

question: Was Roger a victim of Vanessa's?

answer: Yes, which is why he views her the way he does.

question: Does Roger take any blame for himself?

answer: No. It's easier that way.

question: Write a ~1 sentence summary.

answer: Roger silently judges a seemingly perfect woman (Vanessa) in an aim to make himself feel better about her mistreatment of him.


text:
I remember having lived before. And, I think, a bit later. All though not much later. I am pretty certain this world nears an end. Or pherhaps its just my existance.
It doesn't really make much of a differense. I do hope though, that its only me. This place, this plane of existance on this planet where i have lived my lives is a beautiful place, and I hope it gets at least another few thousand years before expiery.

I could not tell you exactly howe many lives I lived. -Six, for certain, not counting my current embodiment. Flashes of memories that doesnt really fit elsewhere could suggest hundreds of lives. Some times when woken from deep sleep, I truly think I have lived all the lives there is. Yours too, and your parents, your kids and your pets. Every and all lives of men and mer, beasts, fish and bug. I have been the mindless plankton, drifting forever in the currents. I have been a great sabertoothed bear, larger than any bear the world can reminesence today and only a bear because no other mammal would fit the description. I have lived the short lives of mayflies and fleas, and the slow lives of rododendron and captive pandas and the small eterneties of trees . I have ripped flesh from bone with enourmus teeth, flown in and out of freezing clouds on hot-air currents and smelled the differences of earth and rock in the darkness beneath.

 In those seconds between the dream state and being consius, I have watched the boiling oceans settle and mountains grow. Through thousands upon thousands of eyes I have seen contintents break apart and sink, then rise and sink yet again. I have seen the world spanning forests grow and prosper and wither and die, just to feed the lesser forests that came after. I saw evolution happen in every direction, and even when seen from all angles, I could not [recognize] a plan. I have seen, and feldt and used, magick, first in its purest form, the almost purple light-crystals that raced across the night sky in the days of giants and elves. Later in more crude forms, trapped in stones on the tip of pompous mens staves or generated through blood offerings or the now forgotten tower on legendary Atlantis. I remember the disapointment of every conscius mind when the last raw magick was burned and the world became less.

But this is something I can only barely comprehend when awake, and the dreams are washed away. The certainty ebbs, and it is only dreams, except for the beformentioned at least six lives. I remember them mostly as you would remember your own life, through the memories of sight and smell and sound and thoughts. Not their entire lifetime, of course, but years and decages of toil and trouble, and occasional happiness. Discernable lives, hard lived, very different from each other. Despite its beauty, our world has never offered a very comforting life. At the point where physical danger cease, the mind-terror form. We either struggle to survive or we struggle to live, to find meaning where hunger was, to tear down the walls that fear built. You would not belive me as to wich life is preferable.

The reason I belive that my time nears an end is the lack of fear. I have vauge notions that I've felt this way before. After long stays in sickbeds, Right before sharp fangs close around my jugular. While looking into eyes so awash with fear there was nothing left for me, wondering wether the sharp noise or the piece of metal would hurt more.
 I am calm, but not as you would think of the word. The seemingly unmoving ocean will have a myriad of life, right under the surface. Uninhabited forests are never silent for the buzz of insects, desserts holds the ghosts of past, flashing visions into your [pheripical sight]. Your heart beats faster when you submerge in hot water, increasing all your body functions as your mind gets slow.
 The calm am feeling must rather be compared to an area of empty space, far from the path of any celestial body, barely in the light of few and distant stars.
This body is too young. It should not feel this way. But this mind is old, too old.
Too tired...

I am tired, I realize. Tired of this world? I don't know. I can not truly remember.
 I am tired of walking. I have seen most sights this world has offered (I can not remember any of me being the traveling type)
 I am tired of talking. I have said or heard all the words and all the meanings (One of me lived on his tounge, spinning thruths and weaving lies among men who thought themselves gods, walking underneath the white marble walls of the mountains they had built)
 I am tired of creating, as is the definite of man, and mans definiton of God. (I can almost remember, even in waking hours, the days of Indigo Rain, when magick left the heavens. The light-crystals dissipiated into a rainbow-colored fog that covered all the sky (How I wish I could have seen earth from somewhere else in those days) and glowing, light blue drops fell to earth for many generations. In those days, even the simplest mind could manifest a thought with some focus and willpower)
I am tired of being, and it suddenly feels like I have never truly slept. There's no recollection of darkness after an ended life, and the dreams given by night offer no respite. My mind grows heavy as I try to contemplate the possibilty of them being real, but I quickly dislodge the thought. It would not do to loose what sanity I got left.

I am tired, and I think you can see it in my eyes. I have settled on observing, wich is not difficult in an age where everywhere is always under monitor. You, all of you, make do in a world that is not fair to you, and you don't back down. You live hard lives, in fear and struggle, but descernable lifes, and beautiful lives. I am proud of you.

title: On perspective, and the lives of man

question: How many times has the author lived?

answer: They seem to think six, though they're not sure.

question: Is the author conscious?

answer: They do not know, by their own admission.

question: Why does the author believe the end is near?

answer: Their lack of fear.

question: What time of day is it?

answer: It's the morning.

question: Write a ~4 sentence summary.

answer: The narrator talks about consciousness and knowing the end is near. They seem to be oscillating between dream and wakefulness. They know the end is near because of the absence of fear. It is morning and they do not know what will happen.


text:
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-   No extra time is needed to calibrate the OMR sheets. It is done automatically while designing the OMR sheets.
-   The OMR sheets based on the old OMR technology can also be calibrated with this software.
-   You can calibrate the sheets with or without timeline.
-   You can transfer the sheets to other branches of the institute via free backup server facility.
-   The OMR sheets are exported to open source software and hence a supporting software license is not required. You can also design OMR sheets with the help of MS Word templates.
-   You can also create OMR forms with unique barcodes or variable data using this software.
-   Know more about OMR sheet designing (link).

Features Related to Printing of OMR Sheets

Just like you design your own OMR sheets, you can also print them on your own. In other words, there is no need to hire a printing company to get the OMR sheets printer.

-   The OMR sheets can be printed using laser printers, inkjet printers, photocopiers, rezograph, etc. You can print these sheets in both color and black and white.
-   There is no need to use thick papers for printing these sheets. Normal, plain white paper (60-80 GSM) is quite sufficient.
-   The software has inbuilt module that allows OCR sheet numbers and barcode printing. You will also find a module that generates multi-page PDFs with variable data on every page for digital p

question: When was the article written?

answer: That information can't be found

question: What product is being advertised?

answer: OMR Software from Addmen

question: What operating systems is the software compatible with?

answer: That information can't be found

question: What does the author state as a reason for the increasing popularity of OMR?

answer: Its speed

question: Write a ~1 sentence summary.

answer: The article is an advertisement for OMR software from Addmen which allows the user to design, print, and scan their own OMR sheets.


text:
###Parenting
A small but courageous child enters a restroom and hears the distinct sound of expletives and running water.  Two men are standing there.  One, older at age twenty-six, washes his hands, and mutters constantly about the "fucking fucks out to kill him."  The other, physically aged around 50, uses the urinal placed conveniently in front of him to block out all knowledge that there is a man beside him washing away either his sins or his sanity.  Given the entrance of the child, one would hope that the muttering man might halt his fearful utterances to protect the ears of the unworthy and unprepared, but he continues his rant.  One might also pray that the suddenly cautious and unsocial child might back away from this conversation of insanity.  He does not, and moves quickly past them into the bathroom stall.  This is much to the dismay of both the fifty year old man and the urinal.

-------------------------------------------------------------------
The boy hums the tune to his favorite television series as he allows the urine to escape the dark depths of his body and bathe within the thin fluorescent lighting of the bathroom.  Barely realizing that it is free at last, the urine ends its journey in the rusted and moist pipes of the plumbing.

-------------------------------------------------------------------
The fifty year old man, no longer able to feign his usage of the urinal without looking like a coward in the presence of a child, takes a deep breath and asks why the crazed man is washing his hands so much.  Silence.  The sudden quiet brings fear into the fifty year old man, and he almost forgets to fear for the child situated nearby.  The urinal begins to beckon to the physically aged gentleman again, but he resists the comfort its gleaming, porcelain surface offers.  He begins to ask again, but only a breath of air escapes as the cleanly shaven head of the twenty-six year old man turns toward him and becomes furrowed.  His dark blue eyes pierce into the fifty year old man’s mind.  The silence deafens the occupants of the restroom.  The tune of the child has stopped.  The only remaining sound is that of the delusional man's sink.  A family of cockroaches recently made their home in the drainpipes of that sink.  Supposedly able to withstand the power of a nuclear bomb, they now silently drown in the liquid that gave them life.

-------------------------------------------------------------------
A toilet flushes in the child's stall, ending what could have been an eternity of silence.  The child exits his realm of safety, washes his hands in the twenty-six year old man's sink, and says goodbye to the two men of the bathroom.  He concludes his restroom adventure by leaving through the same cruel door that allowed the three bathroom occupants entrance.

-------------------------------------------------------------------
The two men glance at each other.  The mentally mature man had considered pulling out a small pocket knife and unjustifiably killing the fifty-year old man, but the sight of the child disrupted these thoughts.  Reminded of his childhood, the mature man weeps.

-------------------------------------------------------------------
Meanwhile, the child arrives safely back into the hands of his parents within the Applebee's.  A sweet and smiling waiter asks him what he would like to order.  The child shyly refuses to answer, but after some encouragement from his parents, one word escapes his lips: fuck.

title: Parenting - 550 Words - I am very new at this whole writing thing, so believe it when I order you to criticize to your heart's content. (Warning: Some Language)

question: What's the moral of the story?

answer: You never know what kinds of people occupy public spaces, and there's potential for everyone to greatly impact the other even in transient exposure to each other: the young delusional man possibly murdering the older man, the young boy picking up the F-word from the delusional man.


text:
[]
Photo: Michael Kamber

When Michael Hastings was killed in a single-car crash in Los Angeles at age 33 last June, journalism lost a rare specimen of the breed it needs most: a reporter who doesn’t care whom he pisses off. Hastings was the hothead whose 2010 _Rolling Stone_ article “The Runaway General” led to the dismissal of the Afghanistan commander, General Stanley McChrystal, for the infraction of trash-talking his civilian bosses. Hastings, too, was pilloried after the piece—by his own journalistic peers, in a manner that would prefigure some of the profession’s more recent hostility toward Glenn Greenwald. “Michael Hastings has never served his country the way McChrystal has,” said Lara Logan of CBS News.

We now know that Hastings served both his country and profession with more honor than Logan, who later maimed her own career and _60 Minutes_ by perpetrating a Benghazi hoax. And his service isn’t done yet. After Hastings died, a former colleague at _Newsweek,_ where he worked as an intern and war correspondent from 2002 to 2008, sent his widow, Elise Jordan, the draft of a novel he had finished just before his 2010 embed with McChrystal. Titled _The Last Magazine,_ it is being published this month on the anniversary of his passing.

We’ll never know how Hastings might have revised this scrappy debut effort or whether it would have led to a career as a novelist. But as a provocative piece of thinly fictionalized nonfiction, it’s a posthumous mission accomplished. _The Last Magazine_—set at a fictional newsweekly called _The Magazine_ that might as well go by _Newsweek_—tells the story of the run-up to the Iraq War from a perspective that many of his colleagues would like to forget or suppress: as an embed deep inside the so-called liberal media, much of which cheered on the war with a self-righteous gravity second only to Dick Cheney’s. Hastings’s book is a message in a bottle that has belatedly washed up on shore to force us to remember how we landed where we are now.

Where are we, exactly? As President Obama implicitly reconfirmed in last week’s West Point address calling for a restrained American role abroad, the massive blunder of Iraq remains the nation’s inescapable existential burden two and a half years after our last troops departed. Indeed, the war continues to pile up collateral damage and defeats daily. Without America’s wrong turn into Iraq, perhaps the Taliban would be extinct rather than resurgent in Afghanistan as we head for the exits to meet Obama’s new 2016 pullout deadline. Without the taint of the Iraq debacle, a war deceitfully carried out in the name of 9/11, perhaps ticket sales at the new 9/11 museum would not be moving so slowly that one can imagine them ending up at the half-price booth; perhaps even George W. Bush might have dared to show up for the museum’s opening rather than plead a “scheduling conflict.”

As for Iraq itself, the just-completed election (few photos of purple fingers this time) all but guaranteed a third term for Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, a mercurial autocrat like the other leaders America sponsored after 9/11, Afghanistan’s Hamid Karzai and Pakistan’s Pervez Musharraf. Under Maliki, Iraq is an ally of Iran, its partner in supporting the criminal Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad. And though Iraq was not a terrorist stronghold when “shock and awe” toppled Saddam Hussein in 2003, it is today. The Anbar-province city of Fallujah, liberated by American forces in our country’s bloodiest warfare since Vietnam, fell to Al Qaeda earlier this year. As Mark Danner summarized in his ongoing assessment of the war’s origins and legacy for _The New York Review of Books,_ “The Sunni-Shia struggle set in motion by the American invasion of Iraq has become the vortex of a violent political struggle that stretches from South Asia to the Gulf.” Iraq itself has become a one-stop-shopping jihadist laboratory for car bombs, IEDs, and kidnapping scenarios like the one enacted by Boko Haram in Nigeria.

Iraq’s legacy in America goes well beyond the steep toll of casualties, injuries, and billions wasted on corruption and folly. Of the 2.6 million Americans who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, more than half have physical or mental-health problems and give the government low marks for meeting their needs, according to a Washington _Post_–Kaiser Family Foundation survey published in March. Barely a third of the public—and only 44 percent of post-9/11 service members—believes the Iraq War was worth fighting, according to CBS News and _Post_-Kaiser polls. Such is the bipartisan backlash to both post-9/11 wars that a Pew survey last fall found that 52 percent of Americans want their country to “mind its own business internationally”—a record high in the poll’s five-decade history.

It’s the default position of liberals to lay the blame for this apocalyptic legacy—a failing Iraq, unchecked international jihadism, a neo-isolationist America—on the Bushies, who deployed cooked evidence and outright lies to sell the country on the war and then executed their own strategy with breathtaking recklessness and incompetence. The Iraq War cheerleaders on the right, whether think-tank-funded neocon armchair generals or flag-pin-bearing bloviators at Fox News, are also easily identifiable culprits in this story. So are those reporters and editors in the mainstream press who at best failed to vet and at worst jingoistically inflated Bush-administration propaganda about Saddam’s nonexistent weapons of mass destruction.

What tends to be swept under history’s rug is the leading role that the liberal Establishment played in this calamity. A majority of Senate Democrats voted to authorize the war, including the presidential aspirants Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, John Kerry, and John Edwards. Most of the liberal pundits and public intellectuals who might have challenged the rationale for the invasion enlisted in the stampede instead, giving the politicians cover. They are the target of Michael Hastings’s rude little book.

For those who don’t instantly recognize the principal characters in this roman à clef, a minute of Googling will decode it. Sometimes Hastings tosses in actual names, including his own, the 22-year-old protagonist bouncing among the higher-ups succumbing to war fever in their lofty midtown-Manhattan offices. The titular magazine is a relic from a time capsule—when newsweeklies had millions of subscribers and covers that could move markets and the world. But if print newsmagazines have been slouching toward extinction ever since, the culture Hastings captures—like some of the specific Iraq enablers he skewers—is alive and well. The slippery prewar bellicosity at _The Magazine_ (one cover is ingeniously headlined “The Case for War?”) seems as contemporary as ever, as does the disingenuous backpedaling once public opinion starts to go south (another cover: “How They Got It Wrong [And What They Can Do to Make It Right]”). The herd mentality, situational ethics, and fear of standing up to authority depicted in _The Last Magazine_ survive today on op-ed pages, at panels where elite thinkers meet in the mountains of Aspen and Davos, on thumb-sucking talk shows of lofty policy pretensions, and, yes, sometimes in magazines. It’s a bubble where career advancement, as measured through television ubiquity and the sales of books pandering to received middlebrow opinion, matters more than actual thought or intellectual integrity. When the “Michael Hastings” of Hastings’s novel reads a new book by one of the two senior editors competing to be _The Magazine_’s new editor-in-chief, he doesn’t expect to learn what his boss is really thinking, only what the boss has “pretended to think” to advance his personal brand.

In a post he wrote for the now-defunct site True/Slant in 2009 (around the time he was finishing his draft of _The Last Magazine_), Hastings anticipated his novel’s themes. “Supporting the Iraq War was the smart career move, the savvy play,” he wrote, adding that he witnessed “this career pressure at work, first-hand” when, between the summer of 2002 and the start of the invasion in March 2003, “the views of a number of big names at _Newsweek_ flipped like light switches.” Why did they? A big incentive, he wrote, “was the pressure to stay relevant. Being for the war was seen as the cutting edge of thinking. If you were against the war, you were marked as some kind of left-wing throwback, or an isolationist, someone who didn’t get it.” And, as Hastings marveled in 2009, “the consequences for getting it wrong” were “zip.” Indeed, many of those who got it wrong, in his estimation, had become more successful after the war spun out of control. Some have just slunk away from the ruins of the fiasco they supported as if they bear no culpability or responsibility for the wreckage. Now and then, they write lovely pieces thanking those Americans who fought the war for their service.

A month before the invasion in 2003, Bill Keller, then a _Times_ op-ed columnist, took a census of the “I-Can’t-Believe-I’m-a-Hawk Club” he unexpectedly found himself in. It was a large group that included “op-ed regulars at this newspaper and the Washington _Post,_ the editors of _The New Yorker, The New Republic_ and Slate, columnists in _Time_ and _Newsweek._” Contrary to Hastings’s harsh view of their motivations, the liberal hawks all claimed their stands were based on the merits of the case. They believed that Saddam, indisputably a mass murderer of his own people, could be taken out in a surgical military action (“rapid, accurate and dazzling,” in Christopher Hitchens’s formulation). Some believed, as the Bush administration hectored, that Iraq’s arsenal was a ticking time bomb threatening America. Paul Berman imagined that an invasion might “foment a liberal revolution in the Middle East.” Thomas Friedman argued that “America needed to hit someone in the Arab-Muslim world” in addition to Afghanistan to puncture the “terrorism bubble” and tilt the region “onto a democratizing track.”

When these rationales started to collapse, most (though not all) of the original liberal hawks started to scatter. Slate smartly convened periodic online symposia in which its nearly united caucus for war could publicly reconsider. But as the blogger Matthew Yglesias would write at ThinkProgress in 2010, it remained puzzling why the war’s liberal supporters were “so slow to turn against it.” Yglesias had been a mere college student when he supported the invasion, but he was still wise enough to figure out that things were going “badly amiss” when Bush and Tony Blair “pulled the plug on the inspections process” and when, a few months later, it became clear that “there was no scary WMD program and also that there was no real plan for what to do.” Yet, as he wrote, it took “until 2005–2006 for ‘this was a mistake’ to become a conventional view even though no really important new information became available during the interim.”

There were exceptions to this groupthink, of course. Among the boldest was the Slate military-affairs columnist Fred Kaplan, who joined his colleagues in coming down in favor of the Iraq War after hearing Colin Powell’s presentation on Saddam’s alleged WMD before the United Nations Security Council on February 5, 2003. Kaplan pulled back a mere month later—two weeks before the invasion began—after reading a piece by another liberal hawk, George Packer, in the _Times Magazine,_ reporting that at a meeting with Iraqi exiles, Bush revealed his ignorance of the Sunni-Shia division in the country he intended to remake. “I knew immediately they were going to fuck it up,” Kaplan recalled recently. (Packer stayed the course until 2005.) A few other prominent liberal writers—a short list led by Danner, James Fallows, Michael Kinsley, John Judis, and Paul Krugman—opposed the war from the start, for a variety of prescient reasons. Why did so many more, seeing the same evidence that the skeptics did, get it wrong?

The liberal hawks’ explanations are fairly similar: They were bamboozled by the WMD “evidence.” They never imagined that the Bush administration would have gone to war with no plan for the morning after Saddam’s fall. Some pinned the blame on the Brookings Institution fellow Kenneth Pollack, a former CIA analyst, whose book _The Threatening Storm,_ a compendium of errant intelligence, was the go-to case for war. (It is now out of print.) By 2004, the libertarian magazine _Reason_ was seeing a “neat arrangement of responsibility by the liberal hawks: all the blame falls on the president, none on themselves.” Or, as the late British historian Tony Judt put it two years later, most liberal hawks (“Bush’s useful idiots,” he labeled them) “focused their regrets not on the catastrophic invasion itself (which they all supported) but on its incompetent execution.”

What made some of the liberal hawks offensive was their swaggering assumption of moral (and intellectual) superiority to those who challenged their thinking. Many of them slurred the present and former United Nations weapons inspectors Hans Blix and Scott Ritter, who contradicted the Dick Cheney–Judith Miller case for Saddam’s WMD. Hitchens belittled war opponents as leftist “masochists.” Peter Beinart, then editor of _The New Republic,_ accused the war’s critics of “intellectual incoherence” and “abject pacifism.” Dan Savage labeled them “squish-brains,” and Jacob Weisberg, then editor of Slate, wrote that Democratic war critics failed “to take the wider, global battle against Islamic fanaticism seriously.” To their credit, some of these hawks, however tardily, owned up fully to their mistakes and excesses. “I was wrong,” wrote Beinart—simple words that eluded so many others. Andrew Sullivan, who had impugned the patriotism of those who disagreed with his post-9/11 effusions, became a tireless writer on the crimes revealed at Abu Ghraib and more recently went so far as to publish an e-book titled _I Was Wrong_ containing almost his entire hawkish output. He admitted that he had become “enamored” of his own morality, and likened his support for the war to that of “a teenage girl supporting the Jonas Brothers.” Dan Savage, in his inimitable way, said in 2013, “I was not just wrong. I was an asshole about it, and I was an asshole to the people who were right.” After Iraq, he stopped writing about foreign affairs altogether.

A few liberal hawks have also conceded Hastings’s point—that they went along with the pack for reasons that may not have been entirely based on an independent, empirical weighing of the case for war. “The first thing I hope I’ve learned from this experience of being wrong about Iraq,” Weisberg wrote in 2008, “is to be less trusting of expert opinion and received wisdom.” Les Gelb, the longtime foreign-policy hand and commentator, said with notable candor that his “initial support for the war was symptomatic of unfortunate tendencies within the foreign-policy community, namely the disposition and incentive to support wars to retain political and professional credibility.” Bill Keller wrote that it was “surely relevant” that his I-Can’t-Believe-I’m-a-Hawk cohort was “exclusively a boys’ club,” and observed that Samantha Power, the writer who had written more eloquently on the case for American humanitarian interventions than anyone, had chosen not to join it. In his lengthy mea culpa, Keller’s most telling self-observation may be that he had wanted “to be on the side of doing something, and standing by was not enough.” After all, using one’s perch to try to slow down a precipitous rush to war could hardly qualify as action in the feverish, testosterone-thick atmosphere of post-9/11 America.

Some liberal hawks—editorialists and op-ed columnists at the Washington _Post,_ most conspicuously—never recanted. Others conceded their mistakes with so many caveats, so much blame-shifting, or in such soft whispers that it hardly mattered. They just kept marching on as if it were all blood under the bridge. Even as Iraq tumbled into chaos, the “only people qualified to speak on the matter,” Tony Judt marveled in 2006, were “those who got it wrong initially.” That’s largely the case with foreign affairs today. And, as Krugman wrote on the tenth anniversary of Operation Iraqi Freedom, so few lessons have been learned from the debacle that an “exaggerated and inappropriate reverence for authority” now infects so-called serious debate on domestic policy, too. The apocalyptic debt crisis constantly trumpeted by Washington’s bipartisan Establishment for the past several years has proved as illusory as Saddam’s phantom nuclear warheads.

“We live in a world the Iraq War has made,” Danner wrote last December. For the time being, we are defending ourselves against that reality with denial. The public doesn’t want to hear more about the war from anyone, period. That the latest round of Department of Veterans Affairs scandals arrived as a shock to much of Congress, the news media, and the populace shows just how deaf we’ve been even to the longtime complaints of our wounded warriors. All of Hollywood’s serious 9/11-Iraq-Afghanistan movies except one have struggled to find audiences, with _The Hurt Locker_ proving to be the lowest-grossing Best Picture Oscar winner in movie history. (The one hit has been _Zero Dark Thirty,_ which told of our sole clear-cut victory, the killing of Osama bin Laden.) When foreign-policy debate sporadically erupts on the campaign trail or in Washington—whether over Libya, Syria, Egypt, or Russia—the public tunes it out.

That debate, if it can even be labeled as such, is paralyzed at its core by the specter of Iraq. In both political parties, the talking points rarely get beyond the question of whether Barack Obama is enough of an Alpha Dog in his saber-rattling rhetoric and actions—an empty exercise in intellectual vamping given that the country wouldn’t support the hawks’ inchoate prescriptions for Putin-esque action by an American president even if Obama signed on to them. The Vietnam syndrome, supposedly buried after the first Gulf war, is back. When the same liberal hawks who sped us into Iraq call for intervention in Syria, the public shrugs them off just as it does the discredited Bush-Cheney and neocon claques. Little short of another attack on America will rouse the citizenry to enlist in any battle that cannot be waged with drones. But the potential consequences of the public’s disengagement from the global arena extend well beyond matters of war and peace. At a time of seismic change, the last thing America needs to do is “mind its own business internationally.”

Over the long term, there may well be a reckoning: Should the aftershocks set off by the Iraq invasion continue to unravel the world, or a large chunk of it, history will look back at the liberal and conservative hawks alike as having flunked the biggest judgment call of their time. They will be seen not just as counterparts to the bipartisan promoters of the Vietnam quagmire but as frivolous sleepwalkers akin to those who a century ago greased the skids for the catastrophe of World War I.

Over the short term, the domestic political fallout of this failure is still very much with us. Obama’s West Point speech was regarded by many as a riposte to the lengthy recent cri de coeur from the foreign-policy analyst Robert Kagan in _The New Republic_ warning of dire consequences should a war-weary America continue to retreat from the world now as it did in the post–World War I 1920s. But even if Kagan’s fears are justified, he is oblivious to how flawed a messenger he is, as a major proponent of the Iraq War. And he underestimates how hard it will be to mobilize the country to mount any kind of military horse again after the disaster he did so much to cheer on.

Americans may have soured on President Obama since 2008, but they still do agree with him on this point, at least: Iraq was a “dumb war.” That distinction is not the least of the reasons they chose him over Hillary Clinton and John McCain. What both the liberal and conservative elites fail to appreciate as they express continued bafflement over the unexpected rise of a foreign-policy renegade like Rand Paul is that he shares this distinction with the president. Like Obama, he may wield it against his hawkish presidential-primary opponents, and, should it come to that, against Clinton as well. The ironies in this are both so wicked and profound, and so rooted in the epic liberal failure exhumed in _The Last Magazine,_ that it’s all the more tragic that Michael Hastings won’t be here to hold everyone to account.

[]

[]

Iraq Everlasting

question: Approximately when was the article written?

answer: Sometime during the Obama administration, likely just before 2016 since the article mentions other Democratic presidential hopefuls

question: Whose death prompts the author to write?

answer: Michael Hastings, a journalist

question: What is the author's goal in writing the article?

answer: To criticize liberal authors who supported the Iraq war and then flip-flopped when public opinion shifted

question: What is the name of the book Hastings wrote shortly before his death?

answer: The Last Magazine

question: Write a ~2 sentence summary.

answer: The author praises Michael Hastings, a journalist who died about a year ago, for speaking up regardless of who he upset. The author then criticizes liberal authors who supported the Iraq war and later turned against it when public opinion did.


text:
“Hands”

It began almost as soon as I woke up. In fact, it was what caused my awakening. It sounded like there was something crawling within the walls of my bedroom. Mice, I thought. I rubbed my eyes and got out of bed.

I shower silently. I never understood people who listened to music or sang in the shower. Silence is what I liked. Even the sound of the running water made me cringe. The warm water pounded at my back. I felt something soft on my shoulder. I turned around quickly, a chill running up my spine. I turned down the cold water.

I tried to relax again, but the chill never went away. I stepped out of the shower and over to the sink. I pulled a razor and shaving cream out of the medicine cabinet. As I closed the cabinet, I saw the towel that was hanging up drop to the floor in the mirror. I turned around quizzically. Shaking my head and sighing, I bent down to pick up the towel and put it back on the rack just as I saw something scurry across the tiled floor to the sliver of space between the opened bathroom door and the wall. Fuck, it has to be rats. I quickly finished shaving and went downstairs to the kitchen.

Starting a fresh pot of coffee, I tried to remember if I had any rat traps left somewhere. Maybe that would warm me up. I opened the door to the pantry and stood on my toes so I could see the contents of the top shelf. I saw the outline of something and reached my hand in. I felt around until my fingers ran into something soft. It moved just as I went to grab it. I jumped and stepped back. Instinctively, I put my hand over my chest to calm myself. I heard the last few drops dripping into the coffee pot. I poured myself a cup. As I sat, sipping at my coffee, I convinced myself that it was only my imagination. Imagination? Wow, I haven’t used that in years. It was hard for me to even remember the last time my mind wandered elsewhere. Well, there were those times when I- no, I won’t go into that.

I heard a child outside, screaming with joy. I stood up and walked to the kitchen window. Pushing back the curtain, I could see the young boy running through a sprinkler. He screamed again, causing my fist to clench and jaws to lock. There was a sudden, loud crash behind me. I whipped around to find the coffee pot lying in hundreds of pieces on the floor. How had it fallen? Did the rat knock it over? I sighed and went to the hallway closet for rags and a broom.

I threw away the broken glass, and washed the mug I had used. I decided to check the garage for something to kill this rat that kept ruining my morning. I moved past the plastic containers, which were now starting to fill up the garage, to the tools. I really needed to clean them off from the last time I used them. I rustled through a box until I found an old poison rat trap. I opened it and saw it had already been used.

I heard the clicking of heels on the driveway outside the garage door. I sighed to myself and threw the trap away. I heard the doorbell ring and started making my way to the front door. As I was closing the garage door, I felt a tug at the bottom of my pant leg. I looked down, hoping to catch the rat red-handed, but the doorbell rang again. I huffed and stomped to the front of the house. I opened the door halfway.

“Hi,” a young blonde woman was standing on the old welcome mat, smiling at me.

I opened the door fully, “Hello.”

“I just wanted to introduce myself. I just moved in next door,” she smiled and held her hand out.

I looked down at her hand for a moment, then back up to meet her eyes. I shook her hand slowly.

When she pulled away, I noticed her fidgeting with her bracelets, “Well, it was nice meeting you. If you ever need anything, don’t be afraid to ask.”

I flicked my tongue across my lips, still staring at her hands. I smiled at her, “I’ll be sure to do that.”

I closed the door silently and wiped my face with my hand. I turned around and saw grey everywhere. Rats weren’t the cause of my shake up this morning. All around me were severed hands. Shit, I left the garage door open. They began to climb up my pant legs. I tried shaking them off, but they held tight. I began swatting at them. They covered my eyes and mouth. There were just too many.

title: "Hands" a short story I wrote for my English class

question: Is the protagonist hallucinating?

answer: Yes, at the end they see severed hands

question: What makes them think there are rats in the house?

answer: They hear scurrying, something brushes against them in the shower, they grab something soft on the shelf, something knocks over the coffee pot, etc.

question: Why doesn't the protagonist set rat traps?

answer: The last trap was used

question: How does the protagonist know the problem wasn't rats after all?

answer: In the end they see severed hands everywhere trying to climb up their pant leg

question: Write a ~6 sentence summary.

answer: The sound of scurrying wakes up the protagonist, they think it's rats. In the shower something brushes against them. In the cabinet they accidentally grab something soft. Something knocks over the coffee pot and shatters it to pieces. When in the garage they find the last rat trap was used, they suddenly realize the problem isn't rats. They're surrounded by severed hands clawing their way up their pant leg.


text:
SAMSUNG GT-M7500 (known as SAMSUNG EMPORIO ARMANI “NIGHT EFFECT”) is a candybar phone that was announced in January 2009.[1] One of the key selling points of the handset was the user-selectable lighting effects that it came with, plus prominent Emporio Armani branding.[2] As of January 2014, this is the only official Emporio Armani handset products, although Samsung have produced Giorgio Armani branded handsets such as a special edition of the Samsung Galaxy S.[3]

Features

-   Screen size: 2.2 inch OLED screen
-   Resolution: 240 x 320 pixels
-   Phone dimensions: 114.9 x 47.4 x 12 mm
-   Weight: 90.2g
-   Standby Time: Up to 290hrs
-   Talk Time: Up to 4hrs 20mins
-   120mb internal memory
-   3-megapixel camera
-   3.5mm headphone jack
-   3G (HSDPA), EDGE, GPRS, and HSCSD
-   Dedicated music keys
-   FM radio with RDS
-   Messaging: SMS, MMS, Email
-   microSD Card Slot (TransFlash)

[1] GSMArena - Samsung M7500 Emporio Armani

[2] Mobile Gazette - Samsung Night Effect Review

[3] Engadget - Giorgio Armani wants to captivate Galaxy S buyers with new Samsung handset

title: Samsung M7500 Emporio Armani

question: What brand partnered with Samsung to create this phone?

answer: Emporio Armani

question: What is the phone's resolution?

answer: 240 x 320 pixels

question: Which publications have written about this product?

answer: GSMArena, Mobile Gazette, and Engadget

question: How much does this product weigh?

answer: 90.2 grams

question: Write a ~3 sentence summary.

answer: This is a Wikipedia article about the Samsung M7500 Emporio Armani. This phone was created in collaboration with Emporio Armani and announced in January 2009. Some of the phone's features are listed, along with articles regarding the phone.


text:
MARIO DE JESÚS URIBE ESCOBAR (born 1949) is a Colombian politician and lawyer. Uribe-Escobar graduated in Law from the Autonomous University of Medellín and the University of Antioquia.[1][2]

Political career

He began his political career as councilman of his hometown; the municipality of Andes, Department of Antioquia. Between 1982 and 1986 served as deputy of the Department Assembly of Antioquia and then to the Chamber of Representatives of Colombia in representation of Antioquia, serving from 1986 to 1994, in which he was Vice President of the Chamber between 1990 and 1991 and worked as member and president of the Investigations and Accusations Commission. In 1994 Uribe-Escobar was elected to the Senate of Colombia and served until October 2007.[3][4] Uribe-Escobar quit the Senate after receiving a notification from the Attorney General of Colombia calling him to testify on regards to the Parapolitics scandal. He was President of the Senate of Colombia from July 20, 2000 to July 20, 2001.

In 2003 Uribe-Escobar participated in the foundation of the Democratic Colombia Party which was the base of the former _Sector Democrático_ movement. Uribe-Escobar was considered one of the most important allies of President of Colombia and cousin; Álvaro Uribe.[5]

Parapolitics scandal

Alleged meeting with paramilitaries

In relation to the Colombian parapolitics scandal, Uribe-Escobar was first mentioned by Jairo Castillo Peralta aka “Pitirri” who was a former member of the paramilitary group United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC) and was a personal bodyguard of former politician Álvaro García Romero also implicated in the scandal for mingling with paramilitaries. From his exile in Canada, Castillo-Peralta said that Uribe-Escobar had met with AUC top commanders in northern Colombia to negotiate cheaper land in the region of Caucasia and in the Department of Sucre.[6] Uribe-Escobar responded to this saying that he did not have any land in Caucasia or Sahagún but he did have land of his property between the towns of Sahagún and Ciénaga de Oro in the Department of Córdoba which were acquired in 1991.[7]

Testimony of Salvatore Mancuso

Imprisoned AUC paramilitary leader Salvatore Mancuso confessed during a court session that he had met with Uribe-Escobar in two occasions with the purpose of forming a political coalition with then Senator of Colombia, Eleonora Pineda for the 2002 Colombian legislative election. Mancuso said that he had asked Pineda to introduce him. Pineda was later accepted into the Democratic Colombia Party, but before the 2006 Colombian presidential election Pineda was expelled.[8]

Arrest warrant

A Delegated Attorney to the Supreme Court of Colombia found enough merits and evidence to issue an arrest warrant against Uribe-Escobar without a right to pay a fine. Uribe-Escobar was syndicated of “concert to commit crimes” consisting on agreeing to promote illegal armed groups. He had been accused by the Supreme Court but since Uribe-Escobar had renounced from his post as senator, ordinary justice could put him on trial.[9] After receiving the notification Uribe-Escobar announced to the Colombian authorities that he was going to surrender voluntarily and comply with the mandate of the Attorney General of Colombia.[10]

End of penalty

Uribe was set free of prison on November 15, 2012. He spent 54 months in jail.[11]

Asylum petition

[1]  El Pais: Mario Uribe no pudo eludir a la Fiscalía

[2]  terra.com: Mario Uribe

[3]

[4]

[5]

[6]  El Universal (Cartagena): Costa Rica negó asilo a Mario Uribe

[7]

[8]

[9]  Caracol Radio: Tras orden de captura, Mario Uribe busca asilo político

[10]

[11]

title: Mario Uribe Escobar

question: What are the reasons behind Uribe-Escobar consorting with paramilitary groups?

answer: It was revealed by a former member of a paramilitary group that Uribe-Escobar wants to form a political coalition with another senator. However, the Supreme Court of Colombia believes Uribe-Escobar's intentions are much more sinister.


text:
The Adventures of Mr. Paycheck

So, I know a guy. He’s a pretty good guy, but lately something just doesn’t seem right. His name is Mr. Paycheck. He comes to see me pretty regularly and is faithful about it too. But he never stays too long. Quite frankly, he’s a bit of a flake. Also, I think he steals from me.
He brings a gift of cash every time he comes over. He’s a bit stingy though. It seems that his generous gifts are directly related to how long I am gone from my house. I’ve almost developed a system to calculate just how much he will bring on his next visit, but I think this is where he flimflams me. After I do my calculations, I am joyous. “He’s bringing HOW much this time?,” I think to myself… Excited, I travel to his place of origin to pick him up and let our next adventure begin. But when I look at him, he seems thinner than I was expecting. He tells me that a feller by the name of Fica needed some immediate assistance and hell, Mr. Paycheck is a good guy so of course, he helps. “But what about the rest that I was expecting?” I ask. “Well, a Frenchman named Pension told me I should invest with him. And look! He gave me some beans too!” Ugh, alright Mr. Paycheck. What shall we do first? He said that he has some business to take care of before we go ANYWHERE and that I need to get my check book. More money? Why does he always need MY money? “Don’t worry,” he says “It’s for a good cause!” So I let the poor guy sign his name on a few of my checks. My side hurts a little, but it makes him feel important and grown-up. Alright! Let’s go buy some Snickers and tugboats! “Wait, wait, wait… I need to go to the grocery store.” I begin to cry because he ALWAYS spends just a LITTLE too much when he goes. But whatever, I’m used to it by now, so we go and get groceries. He gives them all to me, but if you ask me, the amount he buys SHOULD last until he comes again, but “F THAT!” he says. But my babies need shoes. AND WATER!!! “Maybe next time,” he mutters under his breath.
By now he has paid off his friends and went grocery shopping (and gas about two times) I turn to tell him a funny secret. I knew it would happen, but didn’t think it would be so soon this time. He was gone. All that he left was a little note with my bank account number on it.

The note reads as follows:

Dearest Chadrick,
“I know that we were supposed to have some good times on this visit, but I promise… NEXT time I come visit we can make your wildest dreams come true!
Regretfully so,
Mr. Paycheck

P.S. I left some peanuts in your bank account just in case you get hungry before I return. Just plain though, the honey roasted ones you enjoy so were just too expensive.”

And then it starts all over. I know he will return in 1 week and 6 days, and I look forward to it. So, I leave my house a little longer each time, hoping that he brings more with him on his next trip so that I can FINALLY go buy some Snickers and tugboats.

title: I sometimes write short (very short) stories.  This is one I wrote back when my paychecks were just a little smaller then they are now.

question: Who is Mr. Paycheck?

answer: A personification of how much the narrator is payed every two weeks in the form of their paycheck.

question: Why is the narrator upset about Mr. Paycheck?

answer: The narrator feels they are not paid enough to have a nice lifestyle.

question: What do the peanuts in the narrator's bank account symbolize?

answer: They mean that they have "peanuts", or nothing, in the bank.

question: What does the narrator exhaust their money on day 1 of the pay period?

answer: Groceries and gas.

question: Write a ~1 sentence summary.

answer: This story personifies the narrator's money problems with the figure of Mr. Paycheck, describing their budgeting woes as though the paycheck were a person.


text:
Celebrated as one of the best new silhouettes in recent times, the ADIDAS NMD R1 returns in a women’s exclusive colorway perfect for the summer months ahead.

Constructed in a breathable mesh fabrication with customary Boost cushioning below, this adidas NMD R1 elects for a light peach hue with tonal branding and heel counter.

Priced at $140, give this pair a closer look below and ladies can cop a pair now at select Three Stripes retailers.

[adidas NMD R1 Salmon]
adidas NMD R1 Salmon
[adidas NMD R1 Salmon]
adidas NMD R1 Salmon
Source: Oneness

question: What is the Adidas NMD R1?

answer: It is not stated, but probably a running shoe.

question: Why is breathable mess fabrication important?

answer: To keep feet cool during running.

question: What is the purpose of the Boost cushioning below?

answer: To support feet.

question: What colors are used and why?

answer: A light peach hue with tonal branding, perfect for the summer months ahead.

question: Write a ~1 sentence summary.

answer: Adidas NMD R1 is described with mess fabrication, Boost cushioning and with coloring that will suit summer well.


text: There was once a strikingly beautiful young Lady who tragically and without warning had her Heart broken badly. She was so hurt emotionally by her former lover that desperation began to set in. She was distraught. She put on a beautiful red dress she had worn on their first romantic meeting, walked to the edge of a cliff on the Sea and plunged 111 feet into the icy Abyss below. The Daemons, Siren, and Leviathan beneath the water licked their fangs and waited to ravish her body and Soul, because they knew, as a suicide, the depths of Hell were pulling her down. Unfortunately for her, the Almighty would not protect her directly from what was happening as she sank helplessly into the depths, so instead a Diver was filled with Spirit and Inspiration. A Diver whose Soul was also lost somewhere between Heaven and Hell felt the anguish in her Heart, and as is his natural instinct he sank into the fire and water column leading to Hell. As he descended, the Viscious Sea creatures attacked him, but he tore them to shreds, and their ilk was disheartened. The pressure and heat of the Dive was very disorienting, but the Diver focused on her Spirit which was so passionately intense that it was illuminating his Path and drawing him in. Once the Diver reached her, he never let her go; she is his World now. They are bonded in Eternity. Now as you can imagine, he has brought her back to the Netherworld where their true journey begins. Together they will break free of any limitations, and their new Love will take them much higher, away from the darker depths of emotion that way heavy and Hellish.

title: The Diver and the Lady's Anguish

question: Why did the lady jump off the cliff?

answer: Because she was distraught due to heartbreak.

question: Why did the diver save the lady?

answer: Because of his natural instinct.

question: What would have happened to the lady if the diver had not rescued her?

answer: She would have been devoured by the Daemons, Siren, and Leviathan.


text:
THOMAS EDGAR PEMBERTON (1 July 1849 – 28 September 1905) was an English novelist, playwright and theatrical historian.

Early career

Born on 1 July 1849, he was the eldest son of Thomas Pemberton, the head of an old-established firm of brass founders in Livery Street, Birmingham. A brother was the novelist Max Pemberton. (The earlier actor and lecturer Charles Reece Pemberton was of the same family.) After education at schools in Edgbaston, Pemberton at nineteen entered his father's firm, and in due course gained control of the business, with which he was connected until 1900.[1][2]

Pemberton married on 11 March 1873, in the Old Meeting House, Birmingham, Mary Elizabeth, second daughter of Edward Richard Patie Townley of Edgbaston.[3]

Of literary taste from youth, Pemberton long divided his time between commerce and varied literary endeavours. His novels _Charles Lysaght: a Novel devoid of Novelty_ (1873) and _Under Pressure_ (1874) were less well regarded than his later novel _A Very Old Question_ (3 volumes, 1877). There followed _Born to Blush Unseen_ (1879) and an allegorical fairytale, _Fair-brass_, written for his children.[4]

At his father's house he met in youth Edward Askew Sothern, Madge Kendal and other players on visits to Birmingham, and he soon tried his hand at drama. His comedietta _Weeds_, the first of a long list of ephemeral pieces, mainly farcical, was written for the Kendals, and produced at the Prince of Wales's Theatre, Birmingham, opening on 16 November 1874. His many plays were rarely seen outside provincial theatres.[5]

Collaboration with Bret Harte

He came to know Bret Harte, and his successful play _Sue_ was adapted with Bret Harte's collaboration from the latter's story _The Judgment of Bolinas Plain_. It was produced in America in 1896, and in London at the Garrick Theatre, opening on 10 June 1898. _Held Up_, a four-act play by Harte and Pemberton, was produced at the Worcester Theatre, opening on 24 August 1903. On Bret Harte's death in 1902, Pemberton wrote _Bret Harte: a Treatise and a Tribute._[6]

He succeeded his friend Sam Timmins as the drama critic of the _Birmingham Daily Post_ from 1882 until he retired to Broadway, Worcestershire in 1900.[7]

Theatrical biographies and other works

Pemberton published _Dickens's London_ (1875), _Charles Dickens and the Stage_ (1888), and _The Birmingham Theatres: a Local Retrospect_ (1889). He made his widest reputation as a theatrical biographer, writing memoirs of Edward Askew Sothern (1889), the Kendals (1891), T. W. Robertson (1892), John Hare (1895), Ellen Terry and her sisters (1902), and Sir Charles Wyndham (1905). He was personally familiar with most of his subjects.[8]

Pemberton frequently lectured on theatrical subjects. In 1889 he was elected a governor of the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, Stratford-on-Avon, and showed much interest in its work.[9]

He died after a long illness at his home in Broadway on 28 September 1905, and was buried in the churchyard there. His wife survived him, with two sons and three daughters.[10]

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title: Thomas Edgar Pemberton

question: How many children did Thomas Pemberton have?

answer: Five.

question: What was his wife's name?

answer: Mary Elizabeth.

question: What was his day job?

answer: He ran his father's business, a firm of brass founders.

question: What was the name of his first play?

answer: Weeds.

question: Write a ~1 sentence summary.

answer: The text is about Thomas Edgar Pemberton, a 19th-century English novelist, playwright, and theatrical historian.


text:
Mason’s brush arched and swirled with the careful elegance of a conductor, the foxtail bristles leaving swaths of scarlet across the snow white canvas. He was careful not to make a single mistake, as he only had so much material to paint with. He bit to lower left corner of his lip, his right eye half shut in concentration, as he pushed himself to perfection. He had been practicing for this moment his entire life.

He had familiarized himself with the tool he was using, practicing with it at great lengths. He had sacrificed some of his physical and mental well-being to obtain the flawless technique he would be using today. He felt that his entire life had led to this moment… and perhaps it had.

He had gone so many days without eating over his years of practice that he was not diverted by the smells wafting up through the wooden boards of his room in the Brass Wolf Inn. Even though tonight was the village’s Spring Festivus he was still working undistracted. The odors that were once mouth-watering and intoxicating no longer pulled him away from his work. The earthy scents with a biting pinch from the spiced mead, the subtle call of the peppercorn venison, the sweetly suffocating weight of a bulb of honey-buttered onion, and the familiar memory that accompanied the yeasty allure of freshly baked and airy loaves of bread… none of these held power over him anymore.

This was quite a lot to say for a penniless man on a holiday where the last meal of the night was free. Every copper, every bit every talent he owned, earned, or inherited went into the Painter’s Guild at Ivanhill. Though he had learned so much more after he was expelled and sentenced to a trial, having been taught by the natural flow of the forest when he fled the great city with nothing but a bedroll, a foxtail brush and linen canvas (both stolen), and the clothes on his back.

He had crafted his own paints in the countryside by stealing flour from mills and mixing it with both cold and boiled water and introducing colored clay into the mixture until it was the consistency he needed to paint with. In larger cities he would spend any collected alms on linseed oil and chalk, powdering the latter and mixing the two until he had oil paint to aid in his work and education. Both of these paints he would practice with by painting with his coattail or fingers upon rocks and trees, learning how to use a single color and the pressure upon the strokes of his instruments to create a half-dozen different shades.

The things he painted were elaborate and detailed, having only dense jungle and active wildlife as subjects. He learned to paint both quickly and slowly, to take an image and capture it in the flash before it was gone or to notice small details and slowly work them into the boulders and oak trunks he worked on. With all of his schooling and practical experience, with his hardships and determination, Mason had become a fantastic artist.

Now here he was at the end of the long road he had been traveling. His stolen canvas held aloft by the window, the brush matted in crimson. His hands did not shake, his brow did not sweat, and he breathed as he should rather than holding his breath with each stroke. He exuded confidence, it poured from his posture and movements and began to flood the room as if it were water. Soon it would leak into the floorboard and drip on those below and they would come up to his room to see what force they were beholding.

That was what they did.

Just as Mason had finished the last stroke, he stepped backwards and smiled at the canvas. His work was finished. After all he had gone through he was finally free of the images trapped in his head, he had finally had given life to them. The lines and curves breathed in their first breath of completion upon the canvas as the door to Mason’s room burst open.

Mason was seized by his shoulders and throw to the floor as three men entered the room. One man pinned him down as the others examined the painting with horror. They screamed in his ears – large and powerful fists came down upon his face and broke his nose. Paint poured from his nostrils as the fists continued to come down, smashing his teeth into his mouth and down his throat. Mason gulped for air and swallowed a molar in the chaos.

He was hoisted to his feet and thrown against the back wall, his head slamming into the wood. He stared in shock and horror as flint and steel were brought in. The metal shriek of the tools spat sparks upon the canvas until it began to blaze. Mason watched his life’s work turn to smoke and heat and flames. He was not even given the courtesy of watching it die as it was thrown out of the window and into the streets below where it smoldered into ash away from its creator’s eyes.

Mason screamed and thrashed and wept as they dragged him away. He begged for answers as to why they would treat him and his work so cruelly, for all he had painted was a field of flowers, butterflies, and a beautiful woman standing among them. His art was nearly clichéd, merely done in a more professional manner than most men could achieve.

He was told he knew why as he was taken to the jail to be tried and executed. He was clubbed over the head and his world went dark. The last vision he had of the room in which his masterpiece was created was his palette lying on the floor and a woman kneeling over it, crying, as men tried to console her or drag her away…

title: [OC] "The Painter" - a quick 1,000 words as a writing exercise.

question: What does the story say about Mason's family?

question: What does the story say about Mason?

answer: Mason is a penniless man who dedicated his entire life to perfecting his painting technique, sacrificing some of his physical and mental well-being to achieve this. He used to be a member of the Painter's Guild at Ivanhill, where he gave every copper and every bit of talent until he was expelled and sentenced to a trial for unspecified reasons. Mason fled to the forest with just the clothes on his back, a bedroll, and a stolen linen canvas and foxtail brush. Here, he was taught by the natural flow of the forest (presumably he taught himself) and he learned to craft his own paints by using common materials such as clay, water, linseed oil, and chalk. Since he had no canvas, he used boulders and tree trunks until he had become a fantastic artist.

question: What drove the people to beat, arrest, and execute Mason?

answer: Based on the story, it appears Mason is a sick and twisted person who already got into trouble before. At the Brass Wolf Inn, Mason's "paint" started dripping to the first floor. The townsfolk were horrified to find out what Mason had done. He kidnapped and murdered a child, using the blood as paint for his so-called masterpiece.

question: Why was Mason upset at the men who beat and dragged him away?

answer: Mason was upset because the men burned his painting and threw it out the window. He wasn't given the courtesy of watching his creation die. Mason begged for answers as he was confused as to why the people reacted to his work so cruelly when all he painted was a field of flowers, butterflies, and a beautiful woman standing among them.


text:
Progress.

To Us, it has been the ubiquitous goal. The ultimate End. We who have, in our journeys, seen the World as it was meant to be, as it was supposed to be bestowed upon Us. It is Progress that impels us onwards, both into and out of Ourselves. Long have We wondered when We would accomplish Our goals, when We would find the place that was Our birthright.

But long though We sought, We knew that there was something preventing us from truly becoming. We thought that it was Our failure as creatures whose first home was the place where Mind has no meaning. We wondered in Our confusion if We had been tainted with the blight of Many--if some of Us had broken away from the Unity that binds us all. But after much deliberation and much thought on Our part, we came to a realization. As Truth does reign supreme, We now know what it is that hinders Us in our Progress.

It is Them.

They who believe that the World is Theirs. They who think that the splendors of Flesh and Substance can be bought and sold, that Mind and Thought are commodities unique to them. Their singularity is the poison that spreads through Our vein, Their multiplicity the bane of Our destiny. They have no Unity of Spirit yet Their bodies are identical--but different. They have no Clarity of Mind yet Their thinking is linear--and broken. They live in the place they call [EARTH] yet do not know what it is. Like the muscle is anchored to the bone, so too are They anchored to the World, but cannot move beyond path set for Them--yet they struggle against the current of the World but constantly.

They are a plague upon the World.

When first We knew Them, they felt Us, but did not know Us. They thought of Us as Dreams; They called us Nightmares and saw Us in their Visions. Some believed that We were more than what Their knowledge of the World could explain, that We were Gods or Devils or Things-From-Beyond. They established Their [TEMPLES] to serve Their own ends, thinking to honor Us--and We did suffer.

It was only after We were made to Bleed on the Tree, the †, bound to the Flesh of Their Man-spirit did We know that it was They who plagued Us. Finally were We guided back to the path of Progress, the road that would take Us to the true World. Though Their [TEMPLES] still marred the face of Our Unity, Our freedom from their imperfection was secured. No longer would We be bound, as They were, to blight that was Their corruption. We would rise above, walk Beyond, and reach the heart of the World We had sought for so long.

Now, Our will is clearer than ever and the Unity is stronger than it has ever been. It has been two-thousand, ten, and three Sighs since Our return to Perfection was guaranteed. They war against Themselves daily, breaking the chains and rotting the bonds that made Us suffer for so long. Some among Us know that there will be those among Them who find these Declarations, They who will hear Our songs in their Dreams and prophesy the time of Our reclamation. To Them we have but one thing to say:

We are coming.

title: [Progress]

question: Who is this "we?"

answer: Unclear

question: Who is the "they?"

answer: Unclear

question: What does the author mean by "we were made to Bleed on the Tree?"

answer: Unclear

question: Why are "they" a plague upon the world?

answer: Unclear

question: Write a ~7 sentence summary.

answer: What hinders us from progress is "them." They who believe the world is theirs, who think the splendors of flesh and substance can be bought and sold, who live in the place called Earth yet do not know what it is. They thought we were gods or devils. They established temples to honor us. Our will is clearer and unity stronger than ever. It has been two thousand ten years since our return to perfection was guaranteed. We are coming.