Word: boulderers
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...icon of escape, Wolfgang Mattheuer's Die Flucht des Sisyphos (The Flight of Sisyphus), from 1972, is unmistakable. A worker is suspended in mid-stride, fleeing the path of the stone he has been pushing uphill; he's both dodging the plummeting boulder and heading for an idyllic valley. But here's the twist: when he painted it, Mattheuer was an avowed communist coddled by East German apparatchiks, yet the work is an obvious protest at the condition of life for ordinary folk in the G.D.R. - not the sort of thing one expects a state-supported artist to have produced...
Demetrios Coupounas, an avid outdoorsman and entrepreneur, dreamed of tapping into the money spigot known as the Pentagon. But until last year he had come up parched. A co-founder of GoLite--a privately held outdoor-gear firm based in Boulder, Colo.--Coupounas tried to sell military purchasers on his company's lightweight tents, backpacks and sweat-wicking T shirts. But even after calling evaluators at the Army's gear-testing center in Natick, Mass., meeting with sales reps who hawk wares to the military and calling Navy SEAL officers directly, he had booked just a handful of individual sales...
...which DNA analysis puts a baddie behind bars in an hour. Here the cops use index cards and manual typewriters instead of electron microscopes and bite into paper trails like a dog attacking a steak. This attention to detail, plus a vast canvas of characters, makes for a dense boulder of a story that moves creakily for the first couple of hours. But once it gets rolling, it's irresistible because of the humanity creator-writer David Simon finds in his characters, from cops who risk their careers if they seek out tough cases (because those cases raise the unsolved...
...meters above sea level, this wore our patience as thin as the available oxygen. So he told us to shine our headlamps on the river, and in the halogen glare pointed out a perilous course across black rocks. I teetered giddily at the last boulder, making a leap for the bank and landing in supine embarrassment...
...Then it was up to a wide, boulder-strewn plateau-Goecha La. Peaks once distant now towered over us. Ahead was the primordial bulk of Kanchenjunga, glowing bluish at first, then a soft pink. A curtain of cloud swept across its face, and for a moment its peak was just visible before disappearing again...