Jack Vettriano Strangers In The Night

Jack Vettriano Strangers In The NightJack Vettriano Still DreamingJack Vettriano Sometimes It's A Man's World
gestured Arthur towards a chair which looked as if it had been made out of the rib cage of a stegosaurus. "It was made out of the rib cage of a stegosaurus," explained the old man as he pottered of wire out from under tottering piles of paper and drawing instruments. "Here," he said, "hold these," and passed a couple of stripped wire end to Arthur. The instant he took hold of them a bird flew straight through him. He was suspended in mid-lonely stuck up in the air above it all without so much as a body to his name, but before he had time to reflect on this a voice rang out across the square and called for everyone's attention. A man standing on a brightly dressed dais before the building which clearly dominated the square was addressing the crowd over a Tannoy. "O people waiting in the Shadow of Dair and totally invisible to himself. Beneath him was a pretty treelined city square, and all around it as far as the eye could see were white concrete buildings of airy spacious design but somewhat the worse for wear - many were cracked and stained with rain. Today however the sun was shining, a fresh breeze danced lightly through the trees, and the odd sensation that all the buildings were quietly humming was probably caused by the fact that the square and all the streets around it were thronged with cheerful excited people. Somewhere a band was playing, brightly coloured flags were fluttering in the breeze and the spirit of carnival was in the air. Arthur felt extraordinarily eep Thought!" he cried out. "Honoured Descendants

Renoir Young Spanish Woman with a Guitar

Renoir Young Spanish Woman with a GuitarRenoir Young Girl with Parasol (Aline Nunes)Renoir The Washer-WomenRenoir The Large Bathers I
expressions of shock and amazement piled up on it in a jumbled mess. His left leg, which was in mid stride, seemed to have difficulty in finding the floor again. He stared at the robot and tried to entangle some dartoid muscles. "Zaphod Beeblebrox ...?" he said weakly. "Sorry, did I say something wrong?" said Marvin, dragging himself on regardless. "Pardon me for breathing, which I never do anyway so I don't know why I bother to say it, oh God I'm so depressed. Here's another of those self-satisfied door. Life! Don't Be the envy of other major governments. Wow, this is big league stuff." Ford hunted excitedly through the technical specs of the ship, occasionally gasping with astonishment at what he read - clearly Galactic No one ever mentioned it," muttered Arthur irritably. "Ford, are you alright?" Ford stared at him. "Did that robot say Zaphod Beebof his seat. "She's not asking you to enjoy it," he shouted, "just do it will you?" "Alright," said Marvin like the tolling of a great cracked bell, "I'll do it." "Good ..." snappelebrox?" he said.were in Improbability Drive." "But that's incredible." "No Zaphod. Just very very improbable." "Er, yeah."

Heade Still Life with Apple Blossoms in a Nautilus Shell

Heade Still Life with Apple Blossoms in a Nautilus ShellHeade Two Orchids in a Mountain LandscapeHeade View from Fern Tree Walk, JamaicaHeade Cherokee Roses On A Light Gray Cloth
used to assume that it I was working too much and simply did not have the time. Well, I’ve come to learn that “I don’t have the time” is the biggest lie we can tell ourselves to justify for the lack of action towards activities that can (sometimes) significantly improve the quality of our lives. If we added all the time we spend on unimportant and not urgent things - like web browsing or TV watching - we would have the time, easily. We do have the time!
I used to tell myself, “When I leave my day job, I will have much more time to pursue the things on my lists, which I don’t have time for now.” Things like exercising.
You’d think, now that I’m in a position to create my own schedule (or lack thereof), surely, I should have enough free time to exercise. Well, ladies and gentlemen, I still don’t have enough time. It’s become obvious that without a measurable way of magically inserting random (often unimportant) activities to fill up our day. The same items on my list while I had a day job are still on the list.
We don’t have time for things, until we create time for these things

Turner Approach to Venice

Turner Approach to VeniceDupre Shepherdess Watching Over Her FlockDupre The MilkmaidDupre La Vachere
Yellow," he thought and stomped off back to his bedroom to get dressed. Passing the bathroom he stopped to drink a large glass of water, and another. He began to suspect that he was hung over. Why was he hung over? Had he been drinking the night before? He supposed that he must have been. He caught a glint in the shaving mirror. "Yellow," he thought and decided, no one wanted a bypass, the council didn't have a leg to stand on. It would sort itself out. God what a terrible hangover it had earned him though. He looked at himself in the wardrobe mirror. He stuck out his tongue. "Yellow," he thought. The word yellow wandered through his mind in searchMr L Prosser was, descended from an ape. More specifically he was forty, fat and shabby and worked for the local council. Curiously enough, though he didn't know it, he was also a direct male-line descendant of Genghis Khan, though intervening generations and racial mixing had so juggled his genes that he had no discernible Mongoloid characteristics, and stomped on to the bedroom. He stood and thought. The pub, he thought. Oh dear, the pub. He vaguely remembered being angry, angry about something that seemed important. He'd been telling people about it, telling people about it at great length, he rather suspected: his clearest visual recollection was of glazed looks on other people's faces. Something about a new bypass he had just found out about. It had been in the pipeline for months only no one seemed to have known about it. Ridiculous. He took a swig of water. It would sort itself out, he'd

Gockel Multi-Hued Bottles III

Gockel Multi-Hued Bottles IIIGockel Multi-Hued Bottles IIGockel Multi-Hued Bottles IGockel Moved By The Music VIII
Through the Internet, Corky had accessed not only maps and city-planning charts but also a trove of aerial photography produced by the state of California, offering a bird’s view of these exclusive and secluded enclaves. A were true estates, particularly in that portion over which they now flew; and Corky had memorized the roof lines and the salient features of each palatial structure that lay along their route.[532] Trotter had done his , too. He consulted landmarks less often than Corky, however, for he relied more on compass readings.The only light associated with the airship was the soft glow of the compass, the altimeter, and the few other gauges on the control panel. They were swivel-mounted on a stanchion, allowing Trotter to position them as needed. The combined radiance of these instruments was insufficient to paint the faintest glimmer on the curve of the helium bag immediately overhead.Indeed, more light rose from the great houses over which they glided than from the craft controls. Gold and silver reflections of this rising incandescence glimmered briefly

Vincent van Gogh Still Life with Iris painting

Vincent van Gogh Still Life with Iris paintingVincent van Gogh Harvest Landscape paintingVincent van Gogh Fishing in Spring painting
in was simply, quietly terrified.In answer to every question, he vomited up a mess of information with the conferences, workshops, and seminars. He wrote plays.In Ethan’s experience, industrious people, regardless of the quality of what their labor produced, rarely committed violent crimes. Only in movies did .Dr. Spetz-Mogg had no memory of Rolf Reynerd. On average, three hundred struggling actors attended one of his weekend conferences. Not many of them left a lasting impression.When Ethan and Hazard rose to leave without suggesting that they torture the professor with electric wires to his genitals, Spetz-Mogg accompanied them to the door with visible relief. When he closed the door behind them, he no doubt bolted for the bathroom, his hope that garrulous responses would wash Ethan and Hazard out of his door before they produced brass knuckles and truncheons.This was not the professor for whom they were searching. Spetz-Mogg might encourage others to commit crimes in the name of one ideal or another, but he was too gutless to do so himself.Besides, he didn’t have time for crime. He had written ten works of nonfiction and eight novels. In addition to teaching his classes, he organized pretense of British equanimity belied by shuddering bowels.

John William Waterhouse Echo and Narcissus painting

John William Waterhouse Echo and Narcissus paintingLeonardo da Vinci Madonna with the Yarnwinder paintingRembrandt Rembrandt night watch painting
afraid I might. But tell me.”“I got this pervert.”“What did it say to you?”“Didn’t say anything. He just breathed heavy ... and then made these like animal sounds.”The Mysterious Caller was quiet, but this proved to be a far different silence from the . I don’t require a phone to ring you up any more than I need a car to travel. I need only the idea of a phone.”“The idea of a phone? How’s that work?”“My current position comes with certain supernatural abilities.”“Being a guardian angel, you mean.”death-deep stillness of a moment ago. This hush had in it a host of half-heard twitches, the moth-wing vibration of fluttering nerves, the so-soft tensing of muscles.“At first, I thought he was you,” Fric explained. “So I told him I’d looked up Moloch in the dictionary. The name excited him.”“Don’t ever use star sixty-nine after I call, Aelfric. Not ever, ever again.”“Why?”With hard insistence, revealing a degree of alarm that seemed to be too mortal in character for an immortal guardian angel, the caller said, “Not ever again. Do you understand?”“Yes.”“Do you promise me you’ll never again try to call me back with star sixty-nine?”“All right. But why?”“When I called you in the wine cellar, I didn’t use a phone, the way I did the first time

Rembrandt The Elevation Of The Cross painting

Rembrandt The Elevation Of The Cross paintingRembrandt David and Uriah paintingRembrandt Christ On The Cross painting
Okay. Five bottles spread over each sixteen-hour day. Divide fourteen thousand by five. Twenty-eight hundred.The contents of thisexplained the quote. Fric never dared to ask him for a translation because he found Ming nearly as scary as Mr. Hachette, the extraterrestrial predator disguised as their household chef.Arriving in the last grotto, the point farthest from the wine-cellar entrance, he heard footsteps again. As before, when he cocked his head and listened intently, he detected nothing suspicious.Sometimes his imagination went into overdrive. cellar ought to keep Ghost Dad shitfaced for twenty-eight hundred days. So then divide 2,800 by 365 ...[208] Over seven and a half years. The old man could stay blind drunk until Fric had graduated from high school and had run away to join the United States Marine Corps.Of course, the biggest movie star in the world never drank more than one glass of wine with dinner. He didn’t use drugs at all—not even pot, which everyone else in . “I’m far from perfect,” he’d once told a reporter for Premiere magazine, “but all my faults and failures and foibles tend to be spiritual in nature.”Fric had no idea what that meant, even though he’d spent more than a little time trying to figure it out.Maybe Ming du Lac, his father’s full-time spiritual adviser, could have

Jean Beraud At the Bistro painting

Jean Beraud At the Bistro paintingJean Beraud An Evening Soiree paintingUnknown Artist tango dancers paintingUnknown Artist sweet breath painting
flight, losing his balance as he flew off the last step into the public foyer. He slipped on the Mexican-tile floor, windmilled his arms, but avoided a fall.Running, the perp never looked back, suggesting that he was oblivious of being pursued.As he gave chase, Hazard was in the guy’s head. Expecting Reynerd alone, the rent-a-killer the night, down the exterior steps, maybe thinking about spending some of his hit money on fancy chrome laces for the wheels on his bucket, some on 24-carat flash to drape his lady.Not much wind, cold rain, Hazard on the steps, shooter on the walk: The gap between them closed as inevitably as that between a speeding truck and a brick wall.Then the car horn blared. One long bleat, two short.gink comes in to do a quick pop, he drops the sucker with a heart-buster, manages to avoid getting lit up in the process, breaks hard for the street, and now he’s already thinking about smoking some good bo with some long-legged fresh who’s waiting for him in his crib.The shooter hit the front door, and at the same moment, Hazard landed in the foyer, but the shooter was making too much noise to hear doom closing from behind, and Hazard didn’t slip as his quarry had done, so he was gaining.When Hazard reached the door, the shooter was already out in

Claude Monet Still Life With Melon painting

Claude Monet Still Life With Melon paintingFabian Perez white and red paintingFabian Perez Flamenco Dancer paintingJohannes Vermeer Girl with a Red Hat painting
Hazard had been born Lester, but he loathed his given name. He didn’t like Les any better. He thought the shortened version sounded like an insult.“I’m not less of anything than you are,” he’d once said to Ethan, but affably.Indeed, at six feet four and 240 pounds, with a shaved head that appeared to be as big as a basketball and a neck only slightly narrower than the span of his ears, Hazard Yancy was nobody’s idea of a poster child for minimalism.“Fact is, I’m more of a lot of things than some people. Like more determined, more fun, more colorful, more likely to make stupid choices in women, more likely to be shot in the ass. My folks should have named me More Yancy. I could’ve lived with that.”When he had been a teenager and a young man, his friends had called him Brick, a reference to the fact that he was built like a brick wall.[41] Nobody in Robbery/Homicide had called him Brick in twenty years. On the force, he was known as Hazard because working a case in tandem with him could be as hazardous as driving a dynamite

George Frederick Watts Endymion painting

George Frederick Watts Endymion paintingGeorge Frederick Watts Creation paintingUnknown Artist Venice Grand Canal paintingUnknown Artist Grand Canal scene painting
As you build experience and confidence try more and different jokes. But don’t overdo it. Don’t hog the conversation with one joke after another. A few really good jokes that you can tell with perfect confidence is the aim.
Finally have some one-liners to throw in from time to time. Here are a couple to get you going:
* Velcro - what a rip-off! * ‘Shut up!’ my father explained.
Funny jokes make the world a more interesting place. Enjoy your joke telling!Lands that lay, vast and desolate, between Southern Mirkwood and the hills of the Emyn Muil. What pestilence or war or evil deed of the Enemy had so blasted all that region even Aragorn could not tell.Upon the west to their right the land was treeless also, but it was flat, and in many places green with wide plains of grass. On this side of the River they passed forests of great reeds, so tall that they shut out all view to the west, as the little

Rembrandt Rembrandt night watch painting

Rembrandt Rembrandt night watch paintingLord Frederick Leighton Leighton Flaming June painting
been seen and heard there, sorrow had been known; the Elves feared and distrusted the world outside: wolves were howling on the wood's borders: but on the land of Lórien no shadow lay.All that day the Company marched on, until they felt the cool . A strange creature also had been seen, running with bent back and with hands near the ground, like a beast and yet not of beast-shape. It had eluded capture, and they had not shot it, not knowing whether it was good or ill, and it had vanished down the Silverlode southward.`Also,' said Haldir, `they bring me a message from the Lord and Lady of the Galadhrim. You are all to walk free, even the dwarf Gimli. It seems that the Lady knows who and what is each member
Unknown Artist Jim Dine Hearts paintingAlbert Bierstadt Sierra Nevada painting
evening come and heard the early night-wind whispering among many leaves. Then they rested and slept without fear upon the ground; for their guides would not permit them to unbind their eyes, and they could not climb. In the morning they went on again, walking without haste. At noon they halted, and Frodo was aware that they had passed out under the shining Sun. Suddenly he heard the sound of many voices all around him.A marching host of Elves had come up silently: they were hastening toward the northern borders to guard against any attack from Moria; and they brought news, some of which Haldir reported. The marauding orcs had been waylaid and almost all destroyed; the remnant had fled westward towards the mountains, and were being pursued

John Collier Lady Godiva painting

John Collier Lady Godiva paintingCaravaggio Supper at Emmaus painting
Frodo was glad that it had been abandoned.`From signs that we have seen lately,' said Gandalf, 'I fear that the Redhorn Gate may be watched; and also I have doubts of the weather that is coming up behind. Snow may come. We must go with all the speed that we can. Even so it will take us more than two marches before we reach the top of the pass. Dark will come early this evening. We must leave as soon as you can get ready.''I will add a word of advice, if I may,' said Boromir. 'I was born under the shadow of the White Mountains and know something of journeys in the high places. We shall meet bitter cold, if no worse, before we come down on the other side. It will not help us to keep so secret that we are frozen to death. When we leave here, where there are still a few trees and bushes, each of us should carry a faggot of wood, as large as he can bear.''And Bill could take a bit more, couldn't you lad?' said Sam. The
Caravaggio Judith Beheading Holofernes paintingPierre-Auguste Cot spring painting
the late afternoon, while the others were finishing their breakfast, Gandalf and Aragorn went aside together and stood looking at Caradhras. Its sides were now dark and sullen, and its head was in grey cloud. Frodo watched them, wondering which way the debate would go. When they returned to the Company Gandalf spoke, and then he knew that it had been decided to face the weather and the high pass. He was relieved. He could not guess what was the other dark and secret way, but the very mention of it had seemed to fill Aragorn with dismay, and pony looked at him mournfully.'Very well,' said Gandalf. `But we must not use the wood – not unless it is a choice between fire and death.'The Company set out again with good speed at first; but soon their way became steep and difficult

Godward A Quiet Pet detail

Godward A Quiet Pet detailGodward A PriestessGodward A Pompeian LadyGodward A Pompeian Bath
three or four tall black figures were standing there on the slope, looking down on them. So black were they that they seemed like black holes in the deep shade behind them. Frodo thought that he heard a faint hiss as of venomous breath and felt a thin piercing chill. Then the shapes slowly advanced.Terror overcame Pippin and Merry, and they threw themselves flat on the ground. Sam shrank to Frodo's side. Frodo was hardly less shut his eyes and struggled for a while; but resistance became unbearable, and at last he slowly drew out the chain, and slipped the Ring on the forefinger of his left hand.Immediately, though everything else remained as before, dim and dark, the shapes became terribly clear. He was able to see beneath their black wrappings. There were five tall figures: two standing on the lip of the dell, three advancing. In their white faces burned keen and merciless eyes; under their terrified than his companions; he was quaking as if he was bitter cold, but his terror was swallowed up in a sudden temptation to put on the Ring. The desire to do this laid hold of him, and he could think of nothing else. He did not forget the Barrow, nor the message of Gandalf; but something seemed to be compelling him to disregard all warnings, and he longed to yield. Not with the hope of escape, or of doing anything, either good or bad: he simply felt that he must take the Ring and put it on his finger. He could not speak. He felt Sam looking at him, as if he knew that his master was in some great trouble, but he could not turn towards him. He

Neiman The Cove at Vintage

Neiman The Cove at VintageNeiman The CatchNeiman The Big FiveNeiman The Beatles
the House of Tom BombadilThe four hobbits stepped over the wide stone threshold, and stood still, blinking. They were in a long low room, filled with the light of lamps swinging from the beams of the roof; and on the awkward, like folk that, knocking at a cottage door to beg for a drink of water, have been answered by a fair young elf-queen clad in living flowers. But before they could say anythingtable of dark polished wood stood many candles, tall and yellow, burning brightly.In a chair, at the far side of the room facing the outer door, sat a woman. Her long yellow hair rippled down her shoulders; her gown was green, green as young reeds, shot with silver like beads of dew; and her belt was of gold, shaped like a chain of flag-lilies set with the pale-blue eyes of forget-me-nots. About her feel in wide vessels of green and brown earthenware, white water-lilies were floating, so that she seemed to be enthroned in the midst of a pool.‘Enter, good guests!’ she said, and as she spoke they knew that it was her clear voice they had heard singing. They came a few timid steps further into the room, and began to bow low, feeling strangely surprised and