Word: birding
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...didn't take a missile. It didn't take a meteorite, a bullet or even a bird. In fact, the safety board still doesn't know the exact source of the spark that presumably ignited Flight 800's mostly empty central fuel tank, a container similar to those sloshing just below passengers' feet in many commercial carriers. But the trigger's precise identity may be disturbingly moot. In a week of technical testimony considerably more alarming than had been expected, safety-board chairman James Hall made it clear that the fuel, transformed from a stable liquid state to volatile vapors...
TAKE THE T-BIRD AWAY After 80 years of dominance by the internal-combustion engine, a new kind of automobile is on the way. Several major auto manufacturers are designing hybrid electric cars that have twice the fuel economy and half the carbon-dioxide emissions of today's vehicles. The sticker price is admittedly a few thousand dollars higher but is largely offset by lower fuel bills. Toyota plans to bring the first such car to the market in Japan this week, and other carmakers will soon follow suit (see following story...
...batch of Simon gag lines, except that the gags are too lame even for Simon in a nostalgic haze. One character is a boorish Italian stud with a penchant for malapropisms (he calls Roman gladiators "gladiolas"), and the play's comic piece de resistance is, so help me, a bird's funeral. Simon, like Mamet, is content to trot out his characters two at a time for a series of unfulfilling, barely connected dialogues...
Anthologies tend to lend themselves to filler, but not one of the stories included in The Best American Short Stories disappoints. In a year of monster tomes--Don DeLillo's Underworld, Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon, Haruki Murakami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles--this collection shows that the short story promises to outlive the long novel for good reason...
...years I have been into computers. I remember my family's firstmachine: an Apple IIe. My favorite digital pastime was playing "Dr. J. vs. Larry Bird" and breaking the backboard with a slam dunk so the little cleanup man would come out with his squeaky cart to clean it up like onWoody Woodpecker. But I digress...