Word: arid
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...arid, sparsely populated plain around the village of Badme may not be much of a prize, but that hasn't stopped Ethiopia and Eritrea from sacrificing more men in battles for its control than the U.S. lost during the Vietnam War. (And, of course, the U.S. wasn't facing the prospect of hundreds of thousands of its citizens' dying of starvation back home.) The two countries exchanged heavy fire Tuesday as Ethiopia pressed its advance into territory seized by Eritrea in 1998, and the U.S. moved to win support for a U.N. Security Council arms embargo - having failed last week...
Almost everyone has some appreciation of how water projects have altered the course of civilization in ways we (perhaps foolishly) call benign. Dams and reservoirs permit unimaginable numbers of people to inhabit forbiddingly arid regions--as well as floodplains where cities would be washed away without upstream protection. Sacramento, Calif., for example, is dryer than North Africa, but the Sacramento River, on whose banks it sits, spread 30 miles (50 km) wide during the wettest California winter on record, in 1862, before dams and levees tamed the river. Dams produce more clean energy than nuclear reactors. Irrigation agriculture, largely dependent...
...fundamental achievements that make contemporary civilization work, a stifled yawn. Water, dams, aqueducts, irrigation, hydroelectricity--how borrrrrrring! Really? Los Angeles, world headquarters of celebrity culture, has measured as little as 5 in. (13 cm) of rainfall in a year. And despite occasional monsoons, Southern California is so chronically arid that it couldn't sustain a third of its current population without sucking billions of liters a day out of Lake Mead, the distant Colorado River reservoir formed by Hoover...
...Crimson (6-4, 2-2 Ivy) registered only 22 shots on the day, and only three in the arid final frame...
Harron and co-screenwriter Guinevere Turner do understand the book, and they want their film to be understood as a period comedy of manners. Patrick and his nonfriends care only about their abs and their arid social lives. ("I'm not really hungry," one of them says, "but I'd like to have reservations someplace.") Some of the wit may sound insidey--Ed Gein, the real-life inspiration for Norman Bates, is ID'd as the "maitre d' at Canal Bar"--but it makes a point. To Patrick, serial killers and cafe staffers are interchangeable celebrities...