Word: arctics
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...mixture does not work, partly because the historical and the personal plot lines that Vollmann imagines to be parallel simply are not. One of the former is the death in 1846 of Sir John Franklin and all the members of his British navy Arctic expedition, sent to find the Northwest Passage. Vollmann relates that event to a glum romance in present time between one of the author's fictional alter egos, whom he calls Captain Subzero, and a young, deaf Inuit woman named Reepah. Vollmann insists at length that Subzero, an & Arctic tourist who, as Vollmann himself did, makes...
...Franklin and his wife fascinate historians because they embody so perfectly the courage and blind arrogance of 19th century Britain, but Subzero and Reepah are simply dreary. And Subzero, picking moodily at the scab of his 20th century conscience, fretting that the Inuit find him contemptible, giving tips on Arctic trekking (down sleeping bags collect moisture and freeze; masturbation at very low temperatures isn't worth the trouble) is just not as interesting to Vollmann's readers as to the author himself...
Last week Diann Roffe-Steinrotter could identify with that. Clad in skintight purple spandex at the starting gate of the Olympic course, the diminutive (5 ft. 4 in.) racer from Potsdam, New York, gazed down the ice- glazed slope to the distant valley below. In the Arctic chill, a kaleidoscopic blur of 40,000 snowsuits gazed back through a vast video screen. "I was sick-to-my-stomach nervous," she said. "I tried to drink water. My insides felt like California during the earthquake." But somehow as she zipped past red barns and sailed over moose and lynx paths down...
Harvard Yard was transformed into an Arctic tundra yesterday, as seven inches of snow fell onto the Boston area...
...just don't understand these people. They're the same ones that think Elvis Presley and JFK are catching up on some R&R on an obscure ice glacier in the arctic...