Word: agrounder
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...gold medal." Or you dream about it your whole life, then lose. That's what happened to Patterson's opponent, Russian Svetlana Khorkina. She has ruled women's gymnastics for the better part of a decade, but has never won the Olympic all-around gold. (Her 2000 campaign ran aground when the vault was accidentally set at the wrong height.) Now 25, she knew this was her last shot. The two women's styles could not have been more different - Khorkina, so ethereal she at times looked too frail for the demands of gymnastics; Patterson, throwing herself at the apparatuses...
...committees and eliminating limits on their members' length of service--in the name of developing a pool of specialists in Congress who can challenge the analyses of the intelligence community--has already provoked grumbling from House Republican leaders. The push to create a new intelligence czar, meanwhile, may run aground at the Pentagon, which has made clear it doesn't like the prospect of surrendering its considerable authority over how intelligence resources are allocated. In March, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld warned the commission that consolidating authority over the myriad intelligence agencies "would be doing the country a disservice." The bottom...
...dormitory, by and large, of public-school graduates, who feel the strain of Harvard most in their freshman year,” Updike wrote. “The private-school boys, launched by little Harvards like Andover and Groton, tend to glide through this year and to run aground later on strange reefs, foundering in alcohol, or sinking into a dandified apathy. But the institution demands of each man, before it releases him, a wrenching sacrifice of ballast...
Skeletons on the Zahara (Little, Brown; 353 pages) begins in 1815 when Riley, on his way back from a routine trading voyage--the proverbial three-hour tour--got lost near the Canary Islands and ran aground in what is now southern Morocco. He and his crew suffered horrifying extremes of exposure, hunger and thirst (King is especially good on the gruesome physiology of dehydration) and were eventually taken as slaves by the Bou Sbaa, a tribe of nomadic Arabs who scratched out a perilous living in the Sahara, trading and feuding and drinking surprising amounts of camel urine. Seen through...
...initiative--about race, immigration or taxes, inevitably--on the ballot. Indeed, there is a weird karmic genius to the current electoral gimmick, the movement to recall Governor Gray Davis from office. It has turned politics itself into a ballot issue--with Davis in the dock, representing a system run aground...