Word: boom
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...whether the war will induce a lasting boom in Raytheon's sales remains to be seen...
Suddenly the lookout on the hill yells, "Helicopters! Helicopters!" There are seven of them, all firing rockets. There is incoming artillery fire: Boom- whistle-bang-boom-whistle-bang-boom-whistle-bang. What follows is a mad melee of men scattering like quicksilver into gullies, ditches, crevices, behind hillocks, into hollows. The peshmerga are helpless before these gunships, but it is not for want of trying. They tear open with everything they have: antiaircraft guns, rockets, small arms, machine guns, even mortars. But their fire is confused and disorganized. The "damnation birds" keep wheeling around and coming back, untouchable...
...same time, the baby-boom generation, which accounted for much of the spending binge of the '80s, is reaching middle age. Here come 75 million aching backs. A generation of reluctant grown-ups is raising children, caring for aging parents and beginning to think about retirement. Instead of pumping iron, preening and networking, they are worrying about orthodontists, skateboards and college tuitions. The backyard now has more appeal than the boardroom...
...feel entitled to accept more modest aspirations. The real estate market was a prime example of a 1980s torture track. Americans started thinking of housing as a vehicle for getting rich, rather than as just shelter, and it became an obsession. Author Ann Beattie, a chronicler of the baby boom, fled Manhattan in the mid-1980s for Charlottesville, Va., declaring, "I could not spend the rest of my life listening to people talk about real estate. It's a constant, boring, hysterical subject...
Museums live by getting. They risk stagnating when the flow of works of art into their permanent collections dries up. Which was just what the art-market boom of the 1980s threatened, by sending prices of certain categories of art -- in particular, Impressionism and early Modernism -- beyond their reach. Hence the fierce, if discreet, competition for big donors among big American museums...