Word: brownouts
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First-Half Brownout...
Stupidity is one of my favorite subjects. "It is always amazing," Jean Cocteau wrote, "no matter how often one encounters it." Like sleep, stupidity is a universal, surreal and mysterious phenomenon, a brownout, the mind passing through a tunnel. Sometimes stupidity is hilarious; most of the world's jokes are told by one ethnic group about the stupidity of another ethnic group. In its sinister forms, stupidity turns up as evil's incompetent half brother--evil without supernatural prestige. The "Evil Empire" was, in a more practical sense, the stupid empire; systemic stupidity, not evil or good, brought the Soviet...
After about 30-40 seconds, you should be experiencing a "brownout". This is a period of semi-consciousness in which you are not completely aware of what you are doing. Many describe feeling "unstoppable", as if they are chugging in slow-motion. This is the point at which you should dismount...
...hull rupture sent air spewing out of the ship's 43-ft. Spektr module, which contains science experiments and the American's sleeping quarters, forcing the crew to seal off that portion of the station. Damage to the solar panels cost Mir half its power, leading to a shipwide brownout, and the station itself was thrown into a sickening spin. At week's end Tsibliyev, fellow cosmonaut Alexander Lazutkin and astronaut Mike Foale were reduced to pitching camp in the dimly lighted areas of the station that still work, as failing systems caused heat and humidity to soar...
...brilliance consists in this: second terms are famous for being times of dreary brownout. In music it is called rallentando, a gradual slackening of tempo, a winding down. Dwight Eisenhower's presidency, for example, slipped into senescence in the late '50s. The jinx falls especially on those Presidents who return to the White House on landslides--Richard Nixon, for example, who annihilated George McGovern in 1972, and then, less than two years later, was forced to resign, a step ahead of the Senate's tar and feathers. Lyndon Johnson's great victory in 1964 over Barry Goldwater did not make...