“[Darryll] Brooks and Bernie Walden, a young Tiger Flower employee, dragged the Mothership out of the garage, crammed it into a U-Haul truck and drove it to a tree-lined junkyard in Seat Pleasant. ‘We backed the truck as far as we could out into the woods and kicked it off the truck,’ Brooks says. ‘We had a bottle of something and gave it a toast.’”

…

“It would, in a way, be comforting if the rise of cubicles were simply the result of a bad decision to grant spreadsheets and their budgeteer masters imperial dominion over office space, but that’s just not how it happened. The cubicle revolution, in fact, was above all ideological. The clichés hurled at cubicles were woven into their sound-dampening fabric board from the beginning. Any discerning criticism of office life will have to take this moral history into account. Indeed, it is precisely the axioms of what makes for a good company and a good person buried within the cubicle that most need to be uncovered and held to critical attention.”

…

[In Abu Hamza’s kitchen]

Speaker A: Give it to him … give it more, more, more … go, don’t stop too early … Aaaaay! Too early, too early … give it more … give it more until …

Speaker B [admiringly]: Oooooo!

Speaker A: Huh? You see now? … Engineers are we!

Speaker B: Engineers of … eggs.

…

“He landed in the dark in snow, miles from anywhere, where the local temperature was -38° C. Spinning partly tangled his parachute lines and then the touchdown rockets failed to fire, so the Soyuz hit the ground with great force, breaking some of the cosmonaut’s teeth. Clambering out of his still sizzling cabin, Volynov was afraid of freezing there, so he set out across the snow in his light coveralls in the direction of smoke on the horizon. The helicopter rescue crews soon found the cabin, but to their alarm, the cosmonaut was now missing! Thankfully, they were able to follow the trail of blood from his broken teeth across the snow and located him in an outhouse of local farmers. He couldn’t walk for three days.”

…