Word: briefings
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...question in South Viet Nam was: "Whatever happened to the war?" Communist terror against civilians continued. But in military operations, it was the sixth consecutive week of only scattered and brief engagements, which the Viet Cong broke off with surprising readiness. One explanation: the guerrilla commanders, concerned by threats of stepped-up U.S. intervention, had ordered a temporary slowdown. Besides, it was the rice-planting season in the Mekong Delta, and many a part-time guerrilla was needed at home...
...exists in both an "excited" (radioactive) and an "unexcited" state. It decays from one to the other with the emission of gamma rays. When an F 57 atom in the unexcited state ab sorbs a gamma ray, it too becomes excited, then decays to the unexcited state again a brief instant later. Westinghouse's physicists surrounded excited F 57 atoms with a blanket of the same atoms in the unexcited state and recorded their behavior. As the excited atoms began to decay at the normal rate, some of the gamma rays they emitted were absorbed by unexcited atoms, which...
...Black Gang. What a tourist can do most easily, though, is get clipped. Unwary visitors commonly find themselves staring at bills for as much as $80 after a brief bout of drinking. One sucker discovered to his horror that he had been buying champagne for the whole house, including band and B-girls, and finally coughed up $600. Blackmail, extortion and strong-arm tactics complete the repertory, and in recent years many a waiter has become an owner himself, or else tucked away a small fortune before leaving the Raper for more respectable surroundings...
...cortege reaches Broadway and vanishes into the dark. Shrieks long since shrieked hover in the air like radioactivity, echo along the empty trail. The moment is gone, the brief encounter between man and myth is nothing but memory. Manhattan's greatest spectacle is over. But only for the night. With Hamlet held over until August and nine weeks still to go, his lady is sure to keep the show off the road and onto the street...
Last Survivors. Julian's career was as spectacular as it was brief. Nephew of Constantine the Great, he was born in Constantinople and trained, by imperial edict, for a career in the church. But in the course of a visit to Nicomedia, he came under the influence of apostate theoreticians secretly working toward a return to the old faith-or rather, to an idealized amalgam of paganism and philosophy that they took for the faith of the ancient world. Julian wanted to be a teacher, and might well have been if his half-brother Gallus (whom Vidal paints...