Word: arid
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...scrubby, arid eastern edge of San Fernando Valley, the Los Angeles Animal Regulation Department set out one day in 1954 to pick up a stray dog. The dog was a fine-looking animal, a sleek, year-old abandoned Doberman pinscher that had been tipping over garbage cans, stealing food, mating with purebred bitches, howling to the whines of fire sirens. He was also fast and smart. Time after time, beginning in the summer of 1954, Inspector Roy L. McGowen drove out to the trailer camp area where the dog foraged. Usually, McGowen could pick up a stray inside...
...mankind. Beckett's great strength is to make his readers uneasy. Like all Beckettmen, Mahood echoes the old existentialist plaint that he did not ask to be born and that life's mess is not of his making. Despairingly he sums up his and Beckett's arid philosophy: "I'm mute, what do they want, what have I done to them, what have I done to God, what have they done to God, what has God done to us, nothing, and we've done nothing to him, you can't do anything...
...with his thesis completed and five years at Harvard behind him, Labaree took a welcome respite from the arid Cambridge world and in his retreat found a teaching nook at Connecticut College for Women--long and forever in need of additional unattached male talent on their staff. "I had a little place in Mystic, just far enough from the 850 females on campus." Just far enough away, that is, to minimize social pressures from the 800 students, not to mention the faculty members...
Clouds of Dust. A miracle it was not. It was a triumph of technology over nature. For the second straight year, the prairie earth was made to yield more moisture than it received. An almost snowless winter gave way to an arid spring; by June topsoil began to blow in a grim reminder of the Dirty Thirties. "Every time there was a sprinkle." said a Moose Jaw farmer, "I'd go out and kick the soil. All I got was a cloud of dust...
...large, the libretto was banal. Amid rare lyrical oases were arid stretches sounding as though Menotti's notions about love were being used to teach his Ruritanians basic English. Incidents of little significance were treated as moments of high drama. When the cook announced that her culinary specialty 'has not risen to the occasion,' the music shifted into crescendo furor. There was plenty of theatricality, but much less real theater. By the time Menotti came to the end of his third act, he was faced with the eternal creative problem-how to sign and sing off. Instead...