Lessons+6+-+8

=Lesson 6 - The Dark Rising= Will nodded, then stiffened. All at once he heard noises growing outside the hall, and knew with a dreadful shock of certainty why it was that he had felt such uneasiness a short time before. while thtoc e old lady sat motionless in her chair, and he and Merriman stood again beside the hearth, the great hall was filled suddenly with a hideous mixture of moaning and mumbling and strident wailing, like the caged voices of an evil zoo. It was a sound more purely nasty than an he had ever heard.

The hair prickled at the back of Will's neck, and then suddenly there was silence. A log fell, rustling, in the fire. Will heard the bold beating in his veins. And into the silence a new sound came form somewhere outside, behind the far wall; the heart-broken, beseeching whine of a forsaken dong, calling in panic for help and friendliness. It sounded exactly as Raq and Ci, their own dogs, had sounded when they weer puppies crying for comfort in the dark; Will felt himself dissolve into sympathy, and he turned instinctively towards the sound.

"Oh, where is it? Poor thing - "

As he looked at the blank stone of the far wall, he saw a door take shape in it. It was not a door like the huge vanished pair by which he had entered, bu far smaller; an odd, pinched little door looking totally out of place. But he knew he could open it to help the imploring dog. The animal whined again in more acute misery than before; louder, more pleading, in a desperate half-howl. Will swung impulsively forward to run to the door, then was frozen in mid-step by Merriman's voice.It was soft, but cold as winter stone.

"Wait. If you saw the shape of the poor sad dog, you would be greatly surprised. And it would be the last thing you would ever see."

Incredulous, Will stood and waited. The whining died away, in a last long howl. There was silence for a moment. Then all at once he heard his mother's voice from behind the door.

"Will, Wiii - iill . . . Come and help me, Will!" It was unmistakeably her voice, but filled with an unfamiliar emotion; there was in it a note of half-controlled panic that horrified him. It came again. Will, come and help me " And then an unhappy bread at the end, like a sob.

Will could not bear it. He lurched forward and ran towards the door. Merriman's voice came after him like a whiplash. "Stop!"

"But I must go, can't you hear her?" Will shouted angrily. "They've got my mother; I've got to help--"

"Don't open that door!" There was a hint of desperation in the deep voice that told Will, through instinct, that in the last resort Merriman was powerless to stop him.

"That is not your mother, Will." the old lady said clearly. "Please, Will! his mother's voice begged.

"I'm coming!" Will reached out to the door's heavy latch. ..

desperate dissolve imploring incredulous instinctive odd panic strident sympathy
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=Lesson 7 **- Steve Jobs**= The ideas that John Lasseter pitched was called "Toy Story." It sprang from a belief, which he and Jobs shared, that products have an essence to them, a purpose for which they were made. If the object were to have feelings, these would be based on its desire to fulfill its essences. The purpose of a glass, for example, is to hold water; if it had feelings, it would be happy when full and sad when empty.the essence of a computer screen is to interface with a human. The essence of a unicycle is to be ridden in a circus. As for toys, their purpose is to be played with by kids, and thus their existential fear is of being discarded or upstaged by new toys. So a buddy movie pairing an old favorite toy with a shiny new one would have an essential drama to it, especially when the action revolved around the toys being separated from their kid. The original treatment began, "Everyone has had the traumatic childhood experience of losing a toy. Our story takes the toy's point of view as he loses and tries to regain the single thing most important to him; to be played with by children. This is the reason for the existence of all toys. It is the emotional foundation of their existence."

The two main characters wen through many iterations before they ended up as Buzz Lightyear and Woody. Every couple of weeks, Lasseter and his team would put together their latest set of storyboards or footage to show the folks at Disney in early screen tests, Pixar showed off its amazing technology by, for example, producing a scene of Woody rustling around on top of a dresser while the light rippling in through a Venetian blind cast shadows on his plaid shirt - an effect that would have been almost impossible to render by hand. Impressing Disney with the plot, however, was more difficult. At each presentation by Pixar, [Jeffrey] Katzenberg would tear much of it up,barking out his detailed comments and notes. And a cadre of clipboard-carrying flunkies was on hand to make sure very suggestions and whim uttered by Katzenberg received follow-up treatment.

Katzenberg's big push was to add more edginess to the two main characters. 'it may be an animated move called //Toy Story//, he said, but it should not be aimed only at children."At first there was no drama, no real story, and no conflict," Katzenberg recalled. He suggested that Lasseter watch some classic buddy movies, such as //The Defiant Ones// and //48 Hours//. in which two characters with different attitudes are throuwn together and have to bond.

bond classic conflict discard drama essence foundation render traumatic whim
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=Lesson 8 - __Travels with Charlie: In Search for America__= It would be pleasant to be able to say of my travels with Charlie, :I went out to find the truth about my country and I found it," And then it would be such a simple matter to set down my findings and lean back comfortably with a fine sense of having discovered truths and taught them to my readers. I wish it were that easy.. But what I carried in my head and deeper in my perceptions was a barrel of worms. I discovered long ago in collecting and classifying marine animals that what I found was closely intermeshed with how I felt at the moment. External reality has a way of being not so external after all.

This monster of a land, this mightiest of nations, this spawn of the future, turns out to be the macrocosm of microcosm me. If an Englishman or a Frenchman or and Italian should travel my route, see what I saw, hear, what I heard, their storied pictures would be not only different from mine by equally different from one another. If other Americans reading this account should feel it true, that agreement would only mean that we are alike in our Americaness.

From start to finish, I found no strangers. If I had, I might be able to report them more objectively. But these are my people and this my country. If I found matters to criticize and to deplore, they were tendencies equally present in myself. If I were to prepare one immaculately inspected generality it would be this: For all of our enormous geographic range, for all of out sectionalism, for all of our interwoven breeds drawn from every part of the ethnic world, we are a nation, a new breed, Americans are much more American than they are Northerners, Southerners, Westerners, or Easterners. And descendants of English, Irish, Jewish, German, Polish are essentially American. This is not a patriotic whoop-de-do; it is a carefully observed fact. California Chinese, Boston Irish, Wisconsin German, yes, and Alabama Negroes, have more in common than they have apart. And this is the more remarkable because it has happened so quickly. It is a fact that Americans from all sections and of all racial extractions are more alike than the Welsh are like the English, the Lancashire man like the Cockney. or for that matter the Lowland Scot like the Highlander. It is astonishing that this has happened in less than two hundred years and most of it in the last fifty. The American identity is an exact and provable thing.

classifying ethnic external generality geographic identity objectively perception remarkable route
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=Unit Test Lesson 6 - 8=

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