Remember the Y2K bug? Ahhh, those were the days... I'll never forget that New Year's Eve. My wife and I were in Golden Bay dancing with her parents to Abba songs when suddenly, the rain began to fall. I took it as a sign from Mother Nature that everything was gonna be okay. Sure enough, the clock struck 12, and life went on as normal.
Back in the day, coming out was something very personal. You began by acknowledging the truth, first to yourself, then to close family and friends. Those of us more in the public spotlight, though, also had to 'come out' to the press.
I'm very Belgian, and I will die Belgian. I just have my house in the north of France because I began my career in Paris, even though I don't live there anymore.
If humans evolved in a tiny area of Africa, they only saw plants and animals within a 100-kilometre radius for a million years. When they began to migrate, there would have been different animals and plants - and potentially a lot of allergy issues.
I was pretty new to the Broadway world once I began working in it. I hadn't really grown up being too aware of that many shows or that many actors in shows. I was always obsessed with Judy Garland, though.
If it is right for men to fight for their freedom, and God knows what the human race would be like today if men had not, since time began, fought for their freedom, then it is right for women to fight for their freedom and the freedom of the children they bear.
I began to think my time had come, as the saying is.
The term 'steampunk' itself, now a badge of honor, began as a putdown, a joke. But like 'Big Bang' in cosmology, the diss became the standard.
Once anthropology and geology had opened up the pre-recordkeeping darkness of humanity's long, slow, sustained infancy as suitable grounds for speculation, writers began trying to imagine human existence as it must have been with only stone-age technology.
The universe began as an enormous breath being held. I am glad that it did... until this great exhalation is finished, my thoughts live on.
We loved cars until the '70s or so. Then they became appliances. They turned into motorized cup holders. Most of it has to do with urban sprawl. What began as pleasure ends up in necessity, as so many things do.
My work has been in the field of engaged Buddhism. That is my own practice, which began in 1965 that formed the base for the work I was doing in the civil rights and anti-war movement.
I began photographing in 1946. Before that, I was a painter and drawer, with my mother and father's support. They were a bit pissed when I went into photography. They thought photographers were guys who took pictures at weddings.
I was born poor and without religion, under a happy sky, feeling harmony, not hostility, in nature. I began not by feeling torn, but in plenitude.
As our characters in our 'X-FORCE' began to push at the boundaries of what 'X-FORCE' was, it made perfect story sense for the team to change their name.
When I first began modeling, I was very conventional looking. I had hair down to my waist in a side parting - almost church-like. But beneath the sheath of hair lay this Amazonian, strong-looking frame.
Most critical histories of U.S. involvement in Iran rightly began with the joint British-U.S. coup against democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953, which installed Pahlavi on the Peacock Throne. But it was Kissinger who, in 1972, greatly deepened the relationship between Washington and Tehran.
In 1947, Porsche began work on its 356. In many ways, it was like the original iPhone. It wasn't perfect. It was underpowered. But it was streamlined and aerodynamic.
I began writing 'Matterhorn' in 1975 and for more than 30 years I kept working on my novel in my spare time, unable to get an agent or publisher to even read the manuscript.
I've always enjoyed drinking wine, ever since I was in college. My appreciation really took off when I began to visit Napa. I was toying with an idea of making wine in Napa, but it's prohibitively expensive, and the competition is fierce.
In my first year or so at the 'Post,' I began to write with some frequency on the least important issues - so-called light editorials. The titles themselves are revealing of just how light: 'On Being a Horse,' 'Brains and Beauty,' 'Mixed Drinks,' 'Lou Gehrig,' and 'Spotted Fever.'
The Christians tried to separate themselves from the Jewish crowd so they wouldn't be the recipients of the persecution of the Romans. And the way they did it was to say, the Jews killed our hero too. And so Christians began to define themselves over against the orthodox party of the Jews as a way of surviving against the Roman onslaught.
Since the day of my birth, my death began its walk. It is walking toward me, without hurrying.
I majored in journalism at Arizona State University, where I began writing the columns I write now, but I cannot, in good conscience, refer to myself as a writer. I'm a columnist, maybe a journalist, I guess I'm an author, but writer... no. That's not up to me to call myself, that's rather lofty. It's for the reader to decide.
I sat down with a yellow legal pad and began writing 'A Time to Kill.' Had no idea what I was doing. It became, over a period of several years, a secret little hobby nobody knew about except my wife, because she was reading chapter by chapter.
That satisfied me until I began to figure that if God loved all his children equally, why did he bother about my red hat and let other people lose their fathers and mothers for always?
Sometime between when the Summer of Love ended and the Summer of Sam began, America became a nation of cynics about love.
Only after awhile. After it came out and people began to engage in discussions about the social reflections of the film that I realized it had an importance I hadn't thought of.
There were 900 books on Washington when I began writing on him.
William O. Douglas married not one, not two, not three, but four hot blondes. He was not faithful to any of them, not even the last, and each was younger than the previous woman... But after his personal life began to actually fall apart, he developed a set of values about the Constitution that turned out to maximize our autonomy and freedom.
I began writing seriously in my mid-20s and didn't publish my first book until I was 41.
When I was growing up, there were no women in orchestras. Auditioners thought they could tell the difference between a woman playing and a man. Some intelligent person devised a simple solution: Drop a curtain between the auditioners and the people trying out. And, lo and behold, women began to get jobs in symphony orchestras.
I will begin my presidency with a jobs tour. President Obama began with an apology tour. America, he said, had dictated to other nations. No Mr. President, America has freed other nations from dictators.
The Arab spring that began in 2010 was driven by the educated youth who were connected to the outside world. They had visions of liberal politics derived from social networks. They used innovative means to spread awareness and to network among activists.
Well, when I was very young, maybe 12 years, I began to make investments.
Ever since about 1998, when humankind began fast-forwarding through the gradually-unfolding history of progress, like someone impatiently zipping through a YouTube clip in search of the best bits, we've grown accustomed to machines veering from essential to obsolete in the blink of a trimester.