Word: blastingly
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...survey on my stay in Pakistan? The previous week had been eventful, to say the least. I had landed in Lahore on Thursday, Dec 27. As I left the airport for my hotel my cell phone pinged with an SMS from my wife: "Bhutto dead in Rawalpindi blast." The following few days are a bit of a blur, and then on New Year's Eve I fell sick with some intestinal bug that took two days to beat. "I'm not sure I'm the best person to help you," I told the man. But he insisted...
...mill has again been working overtime. In Karachi, amid reports of rioting and sabotage, stories circulated that the city's water supply had been poisoned and people were afraid to drink it. There were also the conflicting accounts of how Bhutto died - from bullet wounds or from a bomb blast that followed or from fracturing her skull against her car's sun-roof as the assailant blew himself up. In the confusion of reports, many Pakistanis are pointing the finger of blame at President Pervez Musharraf and his allies in Washington...
...wise to be pessimistic. But the possibility of impact calls to mind a loosely related incident that occurred almost exactly 100 years ago, when something exploded above the Tunguska region of Siberia, flattening trees in a 25-mile radius, their trunks pointing outward from the epicenter of the blast. Scientists are pretty sure it was a comet or asteroid - about the same size as 2007 WD5, as it happens - that disintegrated from its own shock wave as it plowed through the atmosphere. (UFO enthusiasts have long been convinced it was a flying saucer that somehow made it across trillions...
...Savages, The Bucket List: these are fairy tales for the dying and their survivors. The Reiner movie gets some honest laughs when physical agony makes its heroes behave less than heroically - "Somewhere," Edward mutters during one lightning blast of pain, "some lucky guy's havin' a heart attack" - but its prescription is essentially whimsical: a Percocet disguised as a miracle cure to defeat the fear of death...
...Nativity-creche-is-a-symbol-of-Western-oppression cranks. The holiday still belonged to kids: we didn't approach it like Christian fundamentalists and we didn't consider it politically incorrect, either. We were like Linus in A Charlie Brown Christmas: we could embrace the message and have a blast celebrating...