Word: ashes
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...standing beside rice paddies in which volunteer field laborers toiled. Messages exhorting citizens to donate night soil blare from loudspeakers on trucks that drive around cities and towns. The country desperately needs fertilizer to maximize yields, but nobody can meet the unrealistic human-waste production quotas, so they mix ash with their contributions, according to refugees...
...monomania of a certain sort. Chess is a particularly enclosed, self-referential activity. It's not just that it lacks the fresh air of sport, but that it lacks connections to the real world outside--a tether to reality enjoyed by the monomaniacal students of other things, say, volcanic ash or the mating habits of the tsetse fly. As Stefan Zweig put it in his classic novella The Royal Game, chess is "thought that leads nowhere, mathematics that add up to nothing, art without an end product, architecture without substance...
...tried to celebrate the last of the upper-echelon hurlers, even as their ranks thinned year by year and the masses around me drank the Kool-Aid and succumbed to the seduction of the home run. But ultimately, it proved fruitless to resist the well-laid plans of the ash-wielding tyrants. Their largest offensive—launched in that fateful summer of ’98—proved too strong for any resistance, and the entire nation became entranced by the hypnotic potion of ball after ball flying out of the shrunken cathedrals. By the time the final...
...extent of the mudflows it generated. And at Nevado del Ruiz, warning signs had abounded since Dec. 22, 1984. At that time a series of earthquakes were detected, followed by 30 minutes of harmonic tremor. Mild tremors continued throughout the spring and summer, and on Sept. 11, ash spewed forth for seven hours, accompanied by a roaring sound and electrical discharges. But for all these red flags, experts were unable to pinpoint when the big boom would come, or even if it would. Lacking that precision, Colombia, perhaps reluctant to disrupt the lives of residents with a false alarm...
Until they can eye a volcano and declare with certainty that it is ready to burst, scientists will remember with a wince their warning nearly ten years ago about Soufrière, a volcano on the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe that began to spout a heavy plume of ash. Goaded by the geologists' alarms, authorities evacuated more than 70,000 people from the area and kept them away for 3½ months. The result: the mountain continued to sputter smoke and cough volumes of ash for a while, but it never blew. --By Natalie Angier. Reported by Christine Gorman/New York and Charles...