Word: ballooned
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...world's first manned balloon flight took place on Nov. 21, 1783, in Paris. The balloon was blue and gold and 70 ft. (about 20 m) tall. It had no basket. You rode on a kind of circular balcony that hung around the balloon's neck like a collar. This meant that there had to be two passengers, for balance, and they had to stay on opposite sides of the balloon at all times. The two men in question were Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier, a young doctor who was exactly as dashing as he sounds...
They couldn't see each other because the balloon was between them, so they had to yell back and forth. As the giant aircraft careened wildly over the roofs of Paris and the two men frantically shoveled straw into the fire that kept it flying, the marquis became more and more hysterical. "We must land now!" he yelled. "We must land now!" Pilâtre stayed icy calm. "Look, d'Arlandes," he said. "Here we are above Paris. There's no possible danger for you. Are you taking this all in?" But the marquis couldn't take it in. When...
...goes through your mind during 90 minutes of Christian improv: "No, no, can't say that, nope, maybe if ... no." In response to a game in which we had to communicate a murder scenario to one another in gibberish, our audience shouted its increasingly bland ideas with fervor: "Turtle!" "Balloon!" "IHOP!" "Bowling!" When one sinner yelled "Uranus!" our troupe member repeated it as "Urahnus." We even had to change the classic "guy walks into a bar, and the bartender says" scenario into "guy walks into a restaurant, and the manager says." This was one tight ahnus-ed group...
...also-ran, movies, the Sandra Bullock romantic comedy The Proposal took second place with an honorable $18.5 million (a 45% drop from its $33.6 million win last weekend). The Hangover hung on with an additional $17.2 million, pumping its cume up to $183.2 million. Pixar's Up started its balloon descent with a $13 million take. And the new sick-child weepie, My Sister's Keeper, cadged a soft $12 million for fifth place...
...started reading books without pictures in them, Beck had a long career being funny. He hosted a morning radio show called Captain Beck and the A-Team and asked listeners to mail raw eggs to the station. I deeply suspect that William Jennings Bryan opened speeches by making balloon animals...