Word: aridity
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...rather than vulgarize. Pieces are shorter than before but cut deeper -- especially 'News from Hell,' concerning the events in Sarajevo by new contributor Anna Husarska. Yet tradition has not been entirely scrapped: see Roger Angell's valedictory to Fay Vincent, recently decapitated commissioner of baseball. Miraculously, after a long arid spell the cartoons are funny again -- particularly those by Lee Lorenz, Danny Shanahan and Leo Cullum ('This is my husband, Greg, and Greg's jacket from a previous marriage...
...chip on its shoulder towards any centralized authority. And during much of the past 500 years, or ever since Phillip II established Madrid as the Spanish capital, much of Barcelona's ire has been directed towards her sister city sprawling in the middle of the peninsula's arid plains...
Auden had it right about Spain: "That arid square, that fragment nipped off from hot/ Africa, soldered so crudely to inventive Europe." One thinks of this while visiting "Al-Andalus: The Art of Islamic Spain," the new | contribution to the 500th anniversary of Columbus by New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art. For a long time, Spain and North Africa were...
...Fall of the Cattle Culture, Rifkin manages to blame the world's burgeoning population of bovines for a staggering spectrum of ecological ills. In the U.S., he charges, runoff from mammoth feedlots is despoiling streams and underground aquifers. In sub- Saharan Africa, cattle are contributing to desertification by denuding arid lands of fragile vegetation. In Central and South America, ranchers are felling tropical rain forests and turning them into pastures for their voracious herds. "The average cow," claims Rifkin, "eats its way through 900 lbs. of vegetation every month. It is literally a hoofed locust...
Pack-rat middens are found in arid regions of North and Central America and take shape when the acquisitive rodent, like its human namesake, collects and carries home virtually all the trash it can find. It piles the debris in its den, where it becomes saturated with urine. As the urine evaporates in the dry climate, it crystallizes, gradually enveloping the collection and forming a large, hard clump. Protected from the elements, the pack rat's trophies, like insects entombed in amber, are preserved for millenniums...