Word: badly
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Malard might stare even that specter down for a little while longer. He did as a boy in the 1930s. "The country around here is not as bad off as it was then, not yet anyway," Malard said. His dad planted seeds that never sprouted. The dust blew so much it covered a hog house on his grandfather's farm. Malard walked right over the top of it. About the only thing that dimmed the sun during the big dry of those years was the clouds of swarming grasshoppers...
...society, a drought of these dimensions was mostly a farm calamity. What could make this drought more menacing than anything yet seen should the rains not come is the interwoven nature of the environment, economy and people. Crop failures, farm bankruptcies, high food costs, transportation disruption, municipal water shortages -- bad as all these are, they are familiar difficulties. Now there is the threat of other, more subtle damage. In California's Silicon Valley, a plan to cut pure reservoir supplies sent a shock through the semiconductor industry. Ionizing mineral-laden well water to the proper purity would send the water...
...consumers supposed to tell good glasses from bad? It is not easy. Last year manufacturers adopted a voluntary labeling code developed by the nonprofit American National Standards Institute. Some glasses now carry tags saying MEETS ANSI STANDARDS. But critics charge the labels are inadequate. ANSI divides sunglasses into three categories: fashion spectacles that shield eyes from only 70% of UV-B and less than 60% of UV-A; everyday eyewear that screens out 95% of UV-B and between 60% and 92% of UV-A; and special-purpose glasses that absorb almost 99% of ultraviolet rays...
Several campy collections of old TV and movie material are fun as well. ( Rhino's Sleazemania series contains howlingly bad excerpts from old antidrug shorts, soft-core porno and previews for grade-Z melodramas ("Terrifying realism! Claws at your unbelieving mind!"). The Video Doll Shoppe, from the New York City-based Video Resources, is a compilation of doll commercials from the 1950s and '60s, including a gloriously dopey promotional film from the Ideal Toy Corp. describing the invention and manufacture of Betsy Wetsy...
...complaining that the medication made him feel as "stagnant as the water under an old millwheel." On a visit to the University of Utah in 1977, the author grows enamored of a teaching fellow and confides to his journal: "Lonely and with my loneliness exacerbated by travel, motel rooms, bad food, public readings and the superficiality of standing in reception lines, I fell in love with Max in a motel room of unusual squalor." Near the end of his life, Cheever, ill with cancer, appears along with John Updike on The Dick Cavett Show. Donaldson carefully paraphrases Cheever's critique...