Word: blob
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...until our necks were sore. Everyone ooed and ahhed, and I think I was the only kid in town who admitted to not being able to see the damn thing. Finally, one frigid night I looked through the telescope at the high school and saw a pea-sized white blob. I'm told it was the comet, but it looked more like frost on the lens to me. I knew from school that we wouldn't see the blob again for 75 years, but that was fine by me because my face and fingers stung from the cold...
...Dining halls had been abuzz with tales of sightings for days, and Harvard's armchair astronomers regaled whoever would listen with hyperbole and an occasional fact. Not wanting to miss out on the chance of four millennia, I turned my eyes skyward yet again. The same pea-sized white blob hung in the sky, and it was only after I cleaned my eyeglasses that I was convinced it was indeed a comet and not a piece of lint from the laundry room--piece of lint whose death toll was presently 39. I shared my disappointment with a companion...
...opportunity to rework the film has maybe soothed some of that old pain. Outdated special-effects shots have been tidied up. (Lucas complains in particular about a "fuzzy Vaseline blob" beneath Luke Skywalker's land speeder.) Computer-generated creatures (Rontos and Jawas and such) were added to the backgrounds of previously static scenes. Extra spaceships with keener moves now flesh out some of the climactic battle scenes. A scene has been restored between Han Solo and the reptilian loan shark Jabba the Hutt that was discarded when Lucas couldn't figure out a satisfactory way to concoct Jabba (he finally...
...bomb is thought to have been planted. The video was sent, along with other promising graphic finds, to a state-of-the-art National Aeronautics and Space Administration imagery facility, where it was digitally enhanced. But the video did not give up its secrets. "It's a black blob," says Kennedy. "You can't tell if it's a person. You can't tell if the backpack is there or under the bench." Another video showed a woman seated on the same bench, but when agents tracked her down, she said she had seen nothing suspicious...
...September morning in 1928, British bacteriologist Alexander Fleming was discarding used culture plates that had been left in a pile on his laboratory workbench while he was on vacation. He noticed that one of the plates contained a blob of moldy contaminant that had apparently grown from particles wafting in through an open window. Having settled on the jellylike nutriment intended for the cultivation of a type of bacteria called staphylococci, the fungus had grown into a flourishing mass...