Word: cataclysmic
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...when he isn't unhinged by nerves. But such nugget-size insights are misleading. Boitano can also stun the crowd with his flare, and Orser can draw gasps for his technical brilliance. So when the battle of the Brians is settled in the Olympic Saddledome on Feb. 20, barring cataclysm, injury or a Soviet upset, predicting the outcome is a matter of Yogi Berra-like simplicity: whichever Brian has the better night will carry home gold...
...most striking aspects of Daniel's list is that five of his ten choices deal more or less with World War II, which is understandable enough for a man who spent much of his professional life covering that cataclysm and its consequences. Yet there is something relentlessly newspaperish about the implication that the great events of history mostly involve war and politics. World War II inflicted an awful carnage -- at least 35 million dead -- but far more people than that have been kept alive by the invention of penicillin and other antibiotics, not to mention the pesticides that eradicated many...
...confident, public-works liberalism of the 1960s is our version of Vienna's 19th century Ringstrasse urban renewal, then Reagan is our reassuring figurehead Franz Josef. The Wiener Werkstatte? The firm of Swid Powell, for whom the most prominent architects design tableware. Turn-of-the-century Viennese could feel cataclysm coming -- and in retrospect, the anonymous presence of young Hitler makes that last-waltz skittishness seem almost operatically prescient. Today the moment-by-moment potential for nuclear war supplies the apocalyptic undercurrent. In both eras, the ambitions of architects and artists seem rather diminished, their work purely picturesque or else...
...which contain an abundance of fine particles. The Uranian rings are made largely of dark "boulders," most of them more than a yard wide, that circle the planet once every eight hours. Many scientists believe they may be the remnants of a large moon that shattered in an ancient cataclysm...
NASA delayed its announcement that thereappeared to be no survivors until it had conductedsearch-and-rescue efforts. Even before Moore'sstatement, it seemed impossible anyone could havesurvived such a cataclysm...