Ellroy shows that in precisely the same spirit of cruelty, resentment and boredom, Brown demonstrates to this younger colleague how to intimidate groups of Latino guys huddled on street corners by driving straight at them, siren blaring – and then notice where they are running.
In your 20s and early 30s, it's hard not to notice the siren song of real estate.
Then at one point, I noticed the siren on my son's fire engine had stopped.
As we walked through the door of New York's exclusive No. 8, operated by nightlife siren Amy Sacco, I immediately noticed they were setting up three stools in the middle of what is periodically my dance floor or catwalk depending on the libation consumed earlier in the evening.
Mr. Acosta said that Mr. Marino noticed sirens coming in the opposite direction as he was heading to pick up his next fare on Saturday morning, but thought nothing of it until the next day, when security camera images showing him walking into the store with Mr. Loughner became part of the police investigation.
Most people exhibit some instinctive reactivity: for example, if you've ever heard a police siren while driving, you probably noticed a jump in heart rate.
During practice, nobody even took notice of the sirens blaring on nearby streets, the nervous beam of a police helicopter's searchlight.
It's very much a zen quality, an extension of the same concept of being able to ignore the helicopters and the sirens -- you don't notice the rest of your life.
By my mid-twenties I'd evolved into a confused and deeply questioning one, and by my late-twenties, when I realized it was a darker and less spiritual setting than I'd originally believed, slipped away with little notice and no sirens or barking dogs in pursuit.
In this story, Orpheus's solution is to play a "sweeter song" than that of the Sirens; his ship also passes unharmed, his men so entranced by his song that they do not notice the Sirens.
