Word: block
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Looking Forward to the new Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young album? So was I. When I was in elementary school and my friends were swooning for the toxic melodies of The New Kids on the Block and Vanilla Ice, I was singing along to the tunes of "Ohio" and "Woodstock," daydreaming about Yasgur's farm and music with a "message." While my friend's musical idols were worrying about hair mousse and Hammer pants, mine were getting liver transplants. But the music I loved was distinctly dated fare, so I had hope that the new CSNY album would take some...
...scientific eyes of the world--and a few well-placed network cameras--watched, Russian scientists used a helicopter to extract a twenty-ton block of ice from the permafrost of Siberia. The block, believed to contain the fully intact remains of a 23,000 year-old woolly mammoth, was transported to Moscow where it now sits in a permanently frozen cave awaiting further scientific examination...
First, although the mammoth's head had been excavated in previous weeks, the scientists reattached the tusks to the block of ice before the helicopter transport. The result was something akin to Dumbo the flying ice cube--a press spectacle just awe-inspiring enough to make any avid watcher of the Discovery Channel...
...alas, just when youngsters of the world had gotten their hopes up that future field trips to the zoo might be a little more fun, Russian zoologist Alexei Tikhonov announced that he believed the block of ice really contained nothing more than a couple of hairballs and a few bones. The strangest twist of all, though, was Tikhonov's suggestion of what should be done with the maybe-mammoth-maybe-algae-filled block...
...opinion it's better to keep the block as it is in its museum [and not investigate its contents], because if we try to take it apart and then find some pounds of wool and two or three mammoth bones, all the journalists will be very sad," Tikhonov said...