Word: blackout
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Despite the brief blackout, the spacecraft hurtled into a nearly perfect 118-mile-high earth orbit. By testing the spacecraft's navigational and guidance computers, the astronauts confirmed that the instruments had been left unscathed by the power surge. Halfway through the second revolution, after ground controllers were assured that Apollo was in perfect shape, Conrad fired the third stage S-4B rocket. The 51-minute burn increased the spacecraft's speed to 24,100 m.p.h., lifted it from orbit and sent it on its way to the moon. Said Conrad: "Everything is tickety...
...satisfying the human need for reassurance, rumor plays a role that truth not always can. It goes through three distinct stages. In the first, the fact content is reduced, partly because of the porosity of human memory, partly because of man's inclination to simplify. The Great Blackout of 1965 was a cause of countless rumors; some people immediately assumed that it was the result of a Communist sabotage plot; others believed that it was an unannounced air-raid test by the U.S. Government. In the next stage, the rumormonger accents certain parts of the story that appeal...
Metaphysical Blackout. Beckett's friend and mentor, James Joyce, once said: "Here is life without God. Just look at it!" In a way, Beckett's entire work is an agonized sermon on that text. In his world, the machinery of existence seems to be grinding to a halt. The titles Krapp's Last Tape, Endgame and Malone Dies suggest a civilization with terminal cancer. The suffocating womb becomes a death trap: the urns encasing the characters in Play, the mound of earth piled up to the heroine's neck in Happy Days, the ashcans of Endgame...
Waiting is the real activity of all Beckett's seemingly totally passive characters. As in an electricity blackout one waits for the light, so in Beckett's metaphysical and moral blackout one waits for new gods and values to replace the old. At times, Beckett seems almost complacent in his despair. Doing nothing is regarded as the higher wisdom and action as impatience, an attempt to induce the birth of some new vital myth that is as yet, in Matthew Arnold's words, "powerless to be born...
...normal times, this intuitive taciturnity serves the reader well. He doesn't have to read the same boring details every morning. But in abnormal times it may not be such a service; and in the grossly abnormal times of last spring, it helped produce a virtual news blackout of one of, the more significant aspects of the Harvard crisis...