The walls of the Franciscan Church of the Assumption of the Holy Virgin Mary were ruined stucco chipping away from the brick underneath, with ghostly frescoes, concrete-filled niches, and one complete, vivid crucifix painted over the altar.
In my fifth year in Beijing, I moved into a one-story brick house beside the Confucius Temple, a seven-hundred-year-old shrine to China's most important philosopher.
I think my first big purchase was actually for my mom. She had one of those '90s TVs in her living room that's like a 10x10 brick, so I purchased her a flatscreen for her living room.
When I was at Berkeley, the framework of quantum field theory could calculate the dynamics of electromagnetism. It could roughly describe the motion of the weak nuclear force, radiation. But it hit a brick wall with the strong interaction, the binding force.
We have cultural expectations that everyone needs a dining room, yet they're only used three times a year. But if I put a bone handle on the door of an upper-end brick home, I'm making an outlandish statement.
Science fiction was rocket-mad for about 40 years until aerospace hit a brick wall about 1970. I would not write off space colonisation or exploration completely, but we are profoundly ill adapted for going boldly into outer space.
I usually point out that most loss of life and property has been due to the collapse of antiquated and unsafe structures, mostly of brick and other masonry.
I live in Brick Towers, a public housing project in Newark's Central Ward. I moved in when the projects were privately owned by a man who the residents and I believed was a grade A slumlord.
Brick and mortar businesses - and the communities that depend on them - cannot continue to bear an unfair sales tax burden from which their on-line competitors are effectively exempt.
I cannot avoid forgiving everybody that threw a brick at me during my various campaigns, so I think it's important for all of us to bury that and say, 'OK, we need to look forward' - we've got to move forward from 'never Trump' to 'never Hillary.'