Time travel, as it turns out, is not for civilian tourists, you don't just climb into a machine, you have to do it from the inside out, with your min… - Thomas Pynchon

Street cred. Anybody who got in before ’97 is considered OK – from ’97 to 2000 it can go either way, maybe they’re not not always cool, but usually they’re not quite the kind of full-service dickhead you’re seeing in the business now.”
“He’s considered cool?”
“No, he’s a dickhead, but one of the early ones. A pioneer dickhead.

"To rule forever," continues the Chinaman, later, "it is necessary only to create, among the people one would rule, what we call...Bad History. Nothing will produce Bad History more directly nor brutally, than drawing a Line, in particular a Right Line, the very Shape of Contempt, through the midst of a People, — to create thus a Distinction betwixt 'em, — 'tis the first stroke. — All else will follow as if predestin'd, unto War and Devastation."

He was visited on a lunar basis by these great unspecific waves of horniness, whereby all women within a certain age group and figure envelope became immediately and impossibly desirable. He emerged from these spells with eyeballs still oscillating and a wish that his neck could rotate through the full 360 degrees.