Word: acridity
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Shortly before midnight on Nov. 10, tankers on a 106-car Canadian Pacific freight train, bound from Windsor to Toronto, jumped the tracks. Three explosions from cars carrying propane sent flames that towered into the sky and rattled windows 30 miles away. Firemen at the scene sniffed acrid fumes leaking from one tanker that contained 81 tons of liquefied chlorine; if that car exploded, its contents could turn into a modern equivalent of the deadly fog at Ypres. Within hours, provincial authorities ordered the largest evacuation in Canadian history; with surpassing smoothness, and little panic, most of the city...
...women who were the main characters of his art. It also seems to be Lautrec's most complete answer to the Parnassian pretensions of French artists' circles in the '90s-the kind of high-mindedness he had mocked as a student, ten years before, with an acrid parody of Puvis de Chavannes's Sacred Grove, into whose pallid scattering of muses he introduced a line of stray moderns from a Paris street, including his stunted self, back turned, urinating on the turf of Parnassus. Lautrec thought the timeless and the eternal a boring joke...
...short, odd silence, followed by a series of low, menacing rumbles. That means the charges have done their work. Aftershocks have shaken loose more than a thousand tons of gold-bearing rock from the ceiling of the cavern. Smoke tumbles up the nearby escape shaft, thick with the acrid scent of ammonia...
Correspondent David Jackson, 28, had never before been on overseas assignment, let alone witnessed a revolution. "But the acrid taste of tear gas is familiar from my college days at Berkeley," says Jackson, who graduated in 1972 and served briefly in the Chicago bureau before arriving in Iran for temporary duty earlier this year. At one point he was threatened by knife-wielding youths but was helped by an Iranian woman. "An hour later," recalls Jackson, "I was sipping tea and peeling a tangerine, the guest of a gracious Iranian family who wanted to tell me their hopes...
Truth was in line, not in color or tone. Some of Blake's most acrid denunciations were reserved for Rembrandt and Rubens, in whose "dark caverns" and "hellish brownness" the true lessons of Raphael and Michelangelo were, in his opinion, lost. His own images were overwhelmingly linear, his style based on outline and infill. The line recalls its 16th century sources in mannerist engravings (Blake never crossed the channel, and so had to depend on prints for his contact with Michelangelo). His famous Glad Day, showing Albion, the spirit of resurgent England, in mid-dance with his arms flung...