Word: aloft
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...robed figure stoops and ignites a circle of blue flame in the red clay soil around him. With one quick twist, a woman fluffs her white veil into swaddling and so conjures up a baby in arms. Horns blare as a crowd of celebrants, resplendent in red, holds aloft a richly caparisoned tent for the wedding of a blind king. A master of military arts orders a disciple to cut off his right thumb and thereby lose his strength and skill. "It is not cruelty," the teacher explains. "It is foresight...
Although the pilots had been briefed by meteorologists on what to expect, they still found conditions aloft astonishingly harsh. Accustomed to clear, broad vistas at high altitudes, the pilots -- who took the ER-2 as high as 68,000 ft. -- were startled to encounter layers of translucent mist composed of tiny ice particles. "I went into clouds at 61,000 ft., and I didn't come out the whole time," says Williams of the first flight. Another surprise: temperatures did not warm when the plane soared into the stratosphere. Instead, they plummeted to -130 degreesF, low enough to cause worries...
...passenger, it is bad enough having to worry about how an airplane--an object clearly heavier than air even without the usual stock of complementary drinks--can possibly stay aloft longer than a football (which is an object lighter than an airplane, though considerably less comfortable for long journeys). But now there is the additional problem of an enemy not particularly deterred by the prospect of his demise...
...harder, of course, to predict the fate of a nation than it is to predict the trajectory of a satellite. But Cory Aquino and her People Power movement, like Skylab, are losing the momentum needed to keep aloft. Isolated from the left and under increasing threat from the nation's military, Cory Aquino may well find herself living next door to Ferdinand Marcos before Christmas...
...stage is chockablock with tenpins aloft, batons atwirl, trapeze and low- wire acts, fire eating and belly dancing, pratfalls, cartwheels and unicycling. Somewhere amid all this are the rudiments of Shakespeare's farcical plot about twin brothers and their twin servants and even a modicum of his language, although not without elaborate nose thumbing at his low and labored puns...