When I go to Afghanistan, I realize I've been spared, due to a random genetic lottery, by being born to people who had the means to get out. Every time I go to Afghanistan I am haunted by that.
I see people having fits because their coffee is too hot or their baked potato is too cold, or some random something is imperfect and somebody can be blamed for it. These people can fly off the handle and nobody says, 'Too much beef will do that to a person.' If it's a vegan: a clear case of alfalfa sprout poisoning.
It used to be if you wanted something nice to wear, you would sew it yourself for your body type. Women before the 20th century didn't have this problem. Now, it seems we're all squeezed into random designs. They're designed for no one.
In my own private-sector work, I have become intrigued with RIWI, a Canadian based company that surveys random respondents on the Web to measure attitudes in otherwise hard-to-reach places.
One thing I've been doing at Baidu is running a workshop on the strategy of innovation. The idea is that innovation is not these random unpredictable acts of genius but that, instead, one can be very systematic in creating things that have never been created before.
We always knew how to honor fallen soldiers. They were killed for our sake, they went out on our mission. But how are we to mourn a random man killed in a terrorist attack while sitting in a cafe? How do you mourn a housewife who got on a bus and never returned?
For Pakistan cricket to stay relevant and strong, the best players have to be available all the time - it's a challenge faced by everyone, but one that particularly relates to us because of our mainly amateur, pretty random, and certainly too thinly spread domestic structure that feeds the national team.
I know comedians who go on weird day trips in order to have random experiences they can talk about. They'll go on their own to Thorpe Park waiting for something hilarious to happen. That's really sad.
Twenty-two is just such a random age. It's a little blah.
There are many random, unprotected sites online that appear safe to use and are ready to accept credit card information. You wouldn't give a stranger off the street your credit card information, so be extra cautious about who you are sharing it with online.
I've evolved in my writing to tell a more emotional story - my publisher, Random House, has urged that.
I'm someone that needs to talk about my problems. I call my mom every single day at school just to vent about random stuff. Singing is the same thing.
I've been asking myself: 'Why put together these things - CDs, albums?' The answer I came up with is, well, sometimes it's artistically viable. It's not just a random collection of songs. Sometimes the songs have a common thread, even if it's not obvious or even conscious on the artists' part.
When you make a melody that doesn't come with words from the get-go, sometimes you're just thinking about random vowel sounds that go with it - and it's really, really hard to write lyrics that actually obey the vowel sounds.
Yearly data put the rest of the noise into perspective. Most of the weekly or monthly random up-and-down movements get smoothed out. Ultimately, this is where long-term investors should be focused.
