Word: birdness
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...test the ability of the 747 to carry its historic passenger in a stable fashion. At 10,000 ft., Pilot Fulton ran through other tests, including shutting off one engine and lowering the landing gear. Fulton's only unusual sensation was "a slight buffeting" caused by the bird perched on his plane's back. The touch down looked every bit as smooth as a commercial 747 landing at New York's J.F.K. Airport...
...California Supreme Court has a long history of pioneering decisions. Back in 1948, for example, it voided a law that banned interracial marriage -anticipating the U.S. Supreme Court by 19 years. Now Governor Jerry Brown is carrying that progressive tradition to the court itself. He has named Rose Elizabeth Bird, 40, California's Agriculture and Services Secretary, to be not only the first woman on the seven-member court but also the chief justice. At the same time, Brown appointed the court's first black: Alameda County Superior Court Judge Wiley W. Manuel...
...romantic origins of Valentine's Day date back as far as the 14th century, when Chaucer compared our contemporary view of February 14 to the romance of bird life...
...race, born to fly upward, wherefore at a little wind dost thou so fall?" So wrote Dante 600 years ago. Even in his age, the idea of individual flight was an ancient desire. Today no fantasy remains more universal than that of the airborne human, riding updrafts like a bird. Most people restrict their air travel to those steelbound auditoriums shuttling back and forth between continents or coasts, an experience that comes no closer to free flight than watching a rerun of Twelve O'Clock High. But as British Science Writer Peter Haining relates in his delightful chronicle...
...historian sees it, such airborne misadventures have a social as well as personal function. They externalize a deep, ineradicable fantasy, and behind the vain, comic flap there flies - however briefly - a valuable purpose. Concludes Peter Haining: "The bird-man is, after all, always there to remind us of his intent ... he flies on as ever in our dreams, on our televisions and radios, and even through our day-to-day conversations. We should surely miss him deeply if he were not there." We should, like Dante, have to dream him all over again...