Word: blot
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...which whizzed within 120 million miles of Earth. Countless people turned out and craned up to see it--among them 39 members of the Heaven's Gate cult who took the comet as a sign that it was time to take their lives. That they did, leaving a dark blot on a brilliant event...
Foale, however, had a handy way to figure it out. If he held up his thumb at arm's length, he could blot out a patch of sky equal to about 1 1/2[degrees] of arc--a point of reference he could use, along with his watch, to determine how fast a spacecraft was moving. Foale swam over to the window, spent a few minutes watching stars come and go behind his thumb, and swam back to Tsibliyev and Lazutkin. "Tell them we're moving one degree per second," he said...
They were, of course, the lucky ones. Between 1933 and 1944, America's record in admitting refugees from Nazism was dismal, a moral blot. Less than half the already stingy immigrant quotas were filled because of the timidity of Franklin Roosevelt and the pigheaded xenophobia of his Under Secretary of State Breckinridge Long. Those in the arts had no special exemptions, of course; but by a combination of stubbornness, string pulling, blind luck and the help of a tiny number of devotees and friends in the U.S., some did get through, settling for the most part in Manhattan...
...standard disaster-film fare, the science is generally sound. As the movie reveals, the first debris disgorged by a volcano is often a great gray mass of ash. The opaque cloud, made of pulverized rock and glass, falls like concrete snow on land and buildings miles away and may blot out the sun for days...
Last month, as we all know, a student was put on probation by the Administrative Board for the shocking crime of making a prank call to Room 13. If a permanent blot on your transcript can result from pretending to be a first-year during a two-minute utterly inoffensive prank call, we shudder to think what will happen to the three unlucky Matherites...