The Masters of the Universe were a set of lurid, rapacious plastic dolls that his otherwise perfect daughter liked to play with. […] On Wall Street he and a few others—how many?—three hundred, four hundred, five hundred?—had become precisely that. . . Masters of the Universe. There was . . . no limit whatsoever!

Do you want to go for coffee?

A lifeless lump, unfashioned, and unframed, / Of jarring seeds

a food-entrainable oscillator