Word: cataclysmic
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...were within its rights to pinch pennies, it’s difficult to imagine what exactly a $63,791.21 rainy day would look like. Perhaps, the UC’s bean-counters will argue, this month’s showdown with University Hall is exactly the sort of cataclysm that savings ought to provide...
...Still, Nigeria's track record of corruption and political patronage may, ironically, spare it from spiraling into a cataclysm of violence. The run-up to the vote was marked by an attack on a police station by Islamist militants in the north and an attempt to blow up the election commission headquarters with a petrol tanker. And in violence directly related to the electoral contest, a total of 65 people were killed. Now, opposition candidates have rejected the vote and may call their supporters onto the streets. That augurs badly for peace, as do threats by militants operating...
Arriving in the country is like touching down the day after a cataclysm--a place where the clocks have stopped. There are roads but few cars, and roadside railings are torn up at the stumps. The shops feature bare shelves and price boards for imaginary products that are changed three times a day. Telephones don't work, the power is out, and blackened factory stacks spew no smoke. People loll in the streets with nothing to do and nowhere to go, even if there were a way to get there. "What do people eat?" I asked a lawyer...
...examination of fantasy and reality. “The Veldt,” in which a virtual-reality playroom takes over the lives of a family, and “To the Chicago Abyss,” about a man who remembers the past before an unstated cataclysm when doing so is a crime against the state, showed two sides of the imagination and its power...
...insight, however painful, on the end-time fears particular to our time. The cold war stories could pin the disaster on a simple East-West showdown. The new apocalypses are more shadowy, less ideological. In Jericho, we do not know who attacked or why. In The Road, the cataclysm may have been war, or it may have been an asteroid strike. Who would do this? you might ask these works. Terrorists? A superpower? Americans? God? Their unspoken shrug: Any. All. None. Pick a number...