Word: 1880s
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Soon after the first long-distance pipelines were laid in the Northeast in the late 1870s and early 1880s, the first oil tankers were allowed to pass through the Suez Canal, and the modern shipping system was born. Today crude oil travels in tankers that can carry up to 4 million bbl. With daily world demand at about 85 million bbl., petroleum represents about a third of all international cargo. And even though the commodity is also measured in kiloliters (in Japan) and metric tons (in Russia), thanks to whiskey, the units are always converted to the 42-gal. barrel...
...immersed himself in one of Asia's most established gay subcultures. Homosexuality has a long history in Japan, with allusions to it documented as far back as the 11th century Tale of Genji. Attitudes changed with the growing influence of Christianity in the 1800s, but since the 1880s Japan has not had laws punishing homosexuality like those passed throughout the British colonies during the same period...
...1880s, some bomb went off in his brain. Ensor started experimenting with pencil drawing, teasing out a jittery, evaporating line that could dissolve form into boiling clouds of light. He applied it for a while to religious subjects weirdly poised between the sacred and the profane. Christ before an uncomprehending contemporary crowd was a favorite. That's also the subject of his most famous painting, Christ's Entry into Brussels in 1889. A cartoonish cacophony of marching bands and lurid faces, it's a mob scene straight out of South Park. (Unfortunately it's not included in the MOMA show...
Early in the 1880s, when his paintings were being excluded from the official salons, Ensor co-founded an alliance of Belgian avant-gardists. Les Vingt - the Twenty - held an annual salon of its own that solicited work from foreign artists including Monet, Renoir and Whistler. In 1887, Georges Seurat contributed nothing less than A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, a tour de force of early modern art. Properly dazzled, a good number of the Twenty became converts to Seurat's pointillism. This was too much for Ensor. He had already dismissed the Impressionists. Who cared about capturing fugitive sunlight when...
...Those unfamiliar with the challenges of building infrastructure in harsh environmental conditions might have assumed that an advanced nation like Australia would have had a north-south transcontinental railway for some time. But the funny fact is that while the Ghan's tracks were first laid in the 1880s, the entire line wasn't fully completed (on an upgraded track) until 2004, and at a cost of nearly $1 billion. Now, luxury trains up to one kilometer long, sometimes numbering 52 carriages, crawl through the forbidding primordial stretches of Outback twice a week, like giant high-speed caterpillars...