Word: backwards
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Based on The Water Is Wide, Pat Conroy's memoir of the year he spent teaching in an all-black elementary school on a backward island off the South Carolina coast, the film features paradisiacal vistas, an enormously engaging performance by Jon Voight in the title role ("Conrack" is the way his students insisted on mispronouncing Conroy's name)-and a profound shortage of dramatic conflict. The children, needless to say, are adorable. They are rendered all the more touching by the superintendent of an inhumane school system and an inflexible principal (the former represented by Hume Cronyn...
...most of the present-day prophets disappoint Thompson. Architect Paolo Soleri, with his beehive city projects aimed at accommodating architecture with ecology, and Educator Ivan Illich, with his hope of "deschooling" society, turn out to be looking backward. Reacting to a world too full of growth, they strive to return to simpler, medieval values. (Nevertheless, both Illich and Soleri represent something Thompson admires: the achievement of authority unaccompanied by institutional power.) The Club of Rome, on the other hand, looks forward to a world of no growth. But Thompson dismisses its recommendations too because he distrusts rule by any "technocratic...
...went like that all week for the Government, just as it has since the trial began a month ago: one step forward and another backward. But while the prosecutors seemed to be making little headway in establishing the charges of conspiracy and obstruction of justice against Mitchell and Stans, they have been methodically accumulating testimony supporting the less spectacular charges of perjury...
...husband Michael after she complained repeatedly about the time she had to spend with her students on drill and review. A doctoral candidate and professor of management sciences at Bernard Baruch College, Michael spent 18 months and $ 1,000 to design, build and program Leachim (Michael spelled backward, more or less), a 5-ft. 5-in., 200-lb. humanoid with black plastic arms and legs. Although his legs are motorized, he is chained and bolted to a table for security. The robot's brain is a computer, made partly from components cannibalized from an RCA Spectra 70. Plugged...
...almost twice as dense. Traveling in a lopsided orbit, it comes as close to the sun as 29 million miles, then sweeps as far away as 43 million miles. To anyone standing on Mercury's surface, the sun would seem to stand still at times, then move backward briefly, in the Mercurian sky. Another oddity: Mercury's trip around the sun takes 88 earth days; yet it rotates on its axis only once every 176 earth days-a fact first discovered in 1965 by earth-based radar. Thus Mercury's "day" is twice as long...