Word: aleut
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Insistently)) Suppose that Mrs. Bush has been kidnapped by a band of Aleut separatist terrorists who are demanding that the island of Attu be towed by a reclamation team under the auspices of the United Nations southward to the San Diego harbor, where the climate is warmer and where the islanders can paddle onshore to catch a movie or a meal at McDonald's. Furthermore, these international criminals say that if their ultimatums are not met within three days, Mrs. Bush, your wife of 47 years, will be set adrift on the Bering Strait in a rubber dinghy with nothing...
...more than 5,000 years, Aleut Indians plied the islands off Alaska in craft made of animal skins and bone. Over time these craft diverged in design from other kayaks. They evolved curiously split bows, sterns that were wide at the top but V-shaped at the bottom, and bone joints that made the vessels 100 times as flexible as modern boats. The Aleuts became shaped to the demands of kayaking vast distances, developing huge upper bodies from relentless paddling and bowed legs that allowed them to sit confined for hours. By the time the Russians arrived in pursuit...
Dyson believes that the baidarka will have a robust future, influencing the shape of modern sport kayaks. Physicist Francis Clauser designed a forked-bow craft for a syndicate in the 1986-87 America's Cup race. Dyson still speaks of the genius of the Aleut kayak builders with reverence: "Modern science has recognized all the elements that went into the baidarka, but nobody put them together to achieve a synthesis the way the Aleuts...