Word: aridity
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...love to be reborn. The time is 1972, and a crisis has brought Zoe to her Wisconsin hometown. Avoiding the draft, her brother had fled to Canada; now he is a drug addict in a local mental hospital. Through him Zoe reawakens from the arid existence of the once loved; recapturing a tender moment they shared as children brings redemption. She learns that "love isn't something you wait for. It's something you do." The novel has echoes of faddish self-help themes, but by interweaving the stories and dreams of three willful women, Morris offers a comforting truth...
...game too, cunningly constructed, sleekly appointed, exuberantly performed by a cast that picks up where bad taste leaves off. This one is not for the kids. Even adults will need moral shock absorbers; Scenes spits out its wit like a Heathers for grownups. Its pleasures may seem arid or acid to anyone who couldn't enjoy, say, a Restoration comedy as it might be played on Dynasty. But in a season when most movies are remakes of most other movies, Scenes is an original. And if you are in the right black mood, you could laugh till your nose bleeds...
Perhaps no one is better prepared for hot, dry summers than Israel's farmers. The Israelis, using drip irrigation and other techniques, have made plants bloom on land that has been barren for millenniums. Portions of the arid Negev, an area once written off as largely uncultivable, today grow fruit, flowers and winter vegetables eagerly sought by European markets. Through a process known as "fertigation" -- dripping precise quantities of water and nutrients at the base of individual plants -- crops can be grown in almost any soil, even with brackish water...
...information about the Moche civilization. A resourceful people of artisans, warriors and farmers who had no written language, the Moche dominated Peru's northern coast from A.D. 250 to 750, some 700 years before the Incas. Using an ingenious system of irrigation canals and channels, they flourished in the arid strip of land between the Andes and the Pacific, at one point reaching a population of more than 50,000, but seem to have vanished abruptly...
...dedicated it to the study of Mars. By 1908, influenced in part by optical illusions and wishful thinking, Lowell had counted and named hundreds of canals, which he believed were part of a large network conveying water from the polar ice caps to the parched cities of an arid and dying planet. Lowell's observations and musings, in turn, inspired British novelist H.G. Wells to write The War of the Worlds, a dramatic account of an invasion of the earth by octopus-like Martians. In 1938 a radio adaptation of that novel by another man named Welles -- Orson, that...