Word: arid
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Rainmaker at Work. The great cloud-milking experiment was born last month when Mayor William O'Dwyer remembered how Nobel Prizewinning Scientist Irving Langmuir had caused 320 billion gallons of rain (enough to fill New York's reservoirs with 60 billion gallons to spare) to fall on arid New Mexico by burning $20 worth of silver iodide. Scientist Langmuir, just retired from General Electric Research Laboratory at 68, did not feel up to taking on New York's job himself, but on his recommendation the city hired as its chief rainmaker a 35-year-old, Harvard-trained...
Hoping against hope that out of one of themWill come the reason for it all; and alwaysOut pops the arid chuckle and centuriesOf cuckoo-spit
Dominating the tableau of aimlessness, decay and sterile joy is the image that gives the poem its name: the parched desert through which a wanderer struggles in search of an oasis. When he comes upon a chapel in the arid mountains, he significantly finds this symbol of faith broken and deserted-"There is the empty chapel, only the wind's home." But at the deepest point of despair, the rumble of thunder brings promise of rain to the waste land. The poem ends with the Hindu incantation, like the first shower of long-looked-for rain, shantih, shantih, shantih...
Though trickily performed on two stage levels, The Bird Cage is all written at one. It has the arid, conscienceless professionalism of the hack; yet it fails less from being no good than from being no fun. The villain has almost every aspect of villainy except its fascination, the play every ingredient of melodrama except its punch...
...Russia and Turkey a cold wave swept into the Middle East, bringing with it a blizzard that raged for 48 hours. Over the Dead Sea and the arid Negeb desert fell a dense blanket of snow, a phenomenon never before recorded in modern Middle East history. Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Cyprus were also hit by the storm, but the infant state of Israel was caught least prepared and suffered most...