Word: aridness
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...desert. The only trees are dwarf willows one and two inches high." The sparse growth surrounding the half square mile of fallen trees is not surprising: the location is Axel Heiberg Island, less than 700 miles from the North Pole in the Canadian Arctic, an arid, frigid region hardly conducive to the growth of any vegetation, let alone large trees. Then how did a forest thrive? The answer, says Basinger, is that the stumps and logs are 45 million years old, remnants of trees that grew when Axel Heiberg Island -- and the world -- was much warmer...
...size creature that looked like a dinosaur with feathers. Now, however, the 150 million-year-old Archaeopteryx has apparently been dethroned by a specimen named Protoavis ("first bird"), which lived 75 million years before Archaeopteryx. Last week's announcement was based on two fragmentary fossil skeletons found in the arid badlands of western Texas in 1984 by Texas Tech University Paleontologist Sankar Chatterjee. They suggest that Protoavis was a contemporary of the earliest dinosaurs. "If the identification is correct," says Yale Paleobiologist John Ostrom, who has examined the crow-size remains, "it has to send us back to the drawing...
...Geographically, climatically, economically, sociologically, Texas is at least five different entities: 1) east Texas, with its piney woods and swamps and large black population, a territory like the Old South; 2) south Texas, with its enormous Hispanic population, a borderland as much Mexican as American; 3) West Texas, arid ranching and oil country with huge vistas and forbidding distances; 4) the Panhandle, high plains farming country like the Midwest; 5) central Texas, the hill country, physically the loveliest part of the state, its roads in springtime bordered with bright wildflowers...
...tour of duty during the Second World War. The stressful monotony of his job has forced him to forget those younger, happier days, until his old friend Antonio (Marcello Mastroianni), intrudes on Robert's busy schedule to remind him of old times. Says Antonio to Robert, "Youva become arid, lika desert." Thus begins Antonio's program of re-hydration...
Perhaps this film is a metaphor for the myth of the triumphant post-war America, and the subsequent disillusionment that left Americans feeling "arid." Perhaps the Old Country is sending us a message to renew our strength by returning to a simpler lifestyle, and then renew our striving for our old ideals. Perhaps Robert Traven represents the hero of our own lives that we were all meant to be. And, perhaps, this is all a bit much...