Word: albatross
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...This year, as Harvard and the nation have witnessed a resurgence of campus activism, comparisons with earlier protestors have intensified. To some, the 1960s are the example today's student activists should strive to follow, but to others, they are an irrelevant and unfair standard, a 30-year-old albatross around the necks of today's student activists...
PAUL MACCREADY In 1977 one of MacCready's creations, the Gossamer Condor, a kitelike affair powered only by a furiously pedaling cyclist-pilot, flew more than 7 min. Two years later, the Gossamer Albatross, an improved model, was pedaled across the English Channel. In 1981 a pilot took the sun-powered Solar Challenger 163 miles from France to a base in England. No wonder the American Society of Mechanical Engineers in 1980 named MacCready its Engineer of the Century. In the years since, MacCready has fashioned such marvels as the wing-flapping pterodactyl that flew in the IMAX film...
...Nice Guy does not easily wear the albatross of eminence. He may joke about it: "I'm powerful enough now to be taken seriously," he says, snapping his fingers like a born Hollywood sharpie. "Plenty of people take my phone calls!" He can also get plaintive: "Me famous?" he asks. "I can't embrace it for a moment. You guys do that." But he knows he is expected to think he's famous, and to love it: "I was working 18-hour days on That Thing You Do!," he says of the 1996 film he wrote and directed...
...Caribbean with a mind-boggling array of sportsman's toys and a retinue of family, friends and assistants. "To work with Jimmy," says pilot Jim Powell, "you've got to think and whistle at the same time." Buffett and his little boy flew his huge, cacophonous 1947 Grumman Albatross seaplane; Jane and their youngest daughter rode in his Citation jet. ("Remember," he tells his audiences, "I am spending your money foolishly." Right now, he's thinking about buying a staggered-wing biplane and a truffle farm in Provence--if Jane will...
...asking "forgiveness, not permission," but when he's repeatedly denied permission to land his seaplane in the waters along his route, he obeys. And when he's flying near the island of Carriacou and sees a "lost tribe of tarpon" in the sea below, he wants to "get the Albatross wet" but doesn't. "To even attempt to obtain permission ...we would have to fly back to St. George's and immerse ourselves in a nightmare of red tape." The author of A Pirate Looks at Fifty isn't a pirate at all. Never...