Word: caving
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Every week, freight trains that are sometimes 80 cars long rumble across the Midwest and into the mouth of a mammoth limestone cave in Kansas City, Kans. Below ground, workers descend upon the boxcars and begin unloading the crated cargo. The tight security suggests an underground nuclear test facility, or maybe a toxic waste storage dump. In fact, the site is actually the U.S. Government's largest warehouse for surplus butter...
...landing "The biggest news story since the crucifixion of Christ." Well, obviously, it wasn't the biggest story since Roman times--but it might have been the biggest news story. News, after all, started out chronicling heroes. Homer and Vergil were only carrying on a tradition that started with cave paintings when they put the Odyssey and Iliad to verse. Praises of exceptional men were to be sung. News today may be little more than bookkeeping, closer to ledger accounting than anything else. But even now we respond, almost intuitively, to heroes. Maybe with a little mistrust, to be sure...
Indians armed with poisoned darts and arrows. Arabian assassins in black masks wielding wickedly whistling scimitars. Nazis by the jackbooted legion, including a Gestapo sadist always dressed in black, always giggling in happy anticipation of torturing someone. A cave where tarantulas drop from the ceiling by the bushel. An underground chamber alive with deadly snakes-7,500 of them...
...former resident of Canaday Hall--the newest Yard dorm--conversing with two administrators asked whether his freshman home had "come apart at the seams." One administrator answered that yes, indeed, it had--shortly after its construction. The inside pasteboard walls, the administrator explained, had begun to cave in shortly after Canaday opened...
...later by default. So devoted was O'Neill to his own plan that he impulsively predicted a week before the budget vote that the fight was already lost. His colleagues, unaware of what their leader was up to, were more than ever convinced by that cave-in that Tip was out of touch...