Word: bents
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...horn. It was as much a trademark as Armstrong's handkerchief. Story goes that in 1953, Dizzy returned to a recording session and found that his trumpet had been sat upon, or fallen upon, or in some way molested. It was bent into a near-perfect 45 degrees angle. He played it anyway and liked what he heard; he used to say he could hear himself better. And that was pretty much the way he was heard, too, from then...
...their messages with encryption codes. Godwin's group is advocating that the government let private individuals use the most powerful encryption systems -- systems that even the FBI can't crack. Unfortunately, such complex codes are likely to undermine the principal virtue of electronic mail: convenience. In the end, people bent on private communication -- or government officials involved in criminal conspiracies -- had best pick up the phone, or better yet, stroll down the hall and have a good old-fashioned face-to-face conversation...
Understanding Cambodia has always seemed like trying to put together a three-dimensional jigsaw of morality, politics and geography. Some pieces are missing, some are scuffed and torn beyond recognition, some bent completely out of shape; a few fit nowhere at all. The picture appears to show a maze through which the country has been stalked by successive monsters: a coup followed by brutal civil war, careless U.S. policies, strategic bombing, a Marxist revolution so bloody that it came to be called autogenocide, international and regional power politics, liberation and occupation by a hated neighbor, famine, decay and renewed civil...
Religious leaders generally value scientists, whether believers or not, for their curious bent and careful explorations of the mechanisms behind the Almighty's work. Though determined Fundamentalists adhere to creationism, most Christian denominations no longer demand strictly literal interpretation of - the Genesis creation account. Catholicism encourages pursuit of scientific knowledge but opposes certain applications, from artificial contraceptives to human genetic engineering...
...fish, the tilapia, cruises irrigation canals devouring any growth that might impede the water flow, but it endangers the Colorado River's sport fish. Coast to coast, European starlings darken the skies. A century ago, the first few were released in New York City by a reader of Shakespeare bent on sharing with the New World every species mentioned by the bard. Today millions of starlings consume and defile our crops and terrorize native bluebirds. So too, we have inadvertently unleashed an invasion of plants, among them, kudzu, hydrilla and water hyacinth...