Word: cometed
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Given that far-out environment, it seemed only natural last November when amateur astronomer Chuck Shramek called in to report he had spotted and photographed "a Saturn-like object" trailing the approaching Hale-Bopp comet. But even the most jaded Bell fans were excited when Courtney Brown, an Emory University professor, called to make a patently ludicrous announcement: his team of three psychic "remote viewers" had focused on Shramek's object and determined it was a spaceship full of aliens. Furthermore, Brown claimed, he had a photograph of the craft taken by a "Top-10-university astronomy professor...
...would proceed from these crafted and layered texts of made-up events and people to the story about the mass suicide of the Rancho Santa Fe cultists who believed the Hale-Bopp comet summoned them to heaven, or the one about Martin Luther King Jr.'s son Dexter visiting James Earl Ray and saying he thought him innocent of his father's murder, or the account of George Bush parachuting out of a plane because his only other jump was during World War II, when Japanese gunners shot up his torpedo bomber and he was forced to bail out over...
...Franzen's gloomy observation has not deflected him or three other gifted writers of his acquaintance: Donald Antrim, Rick Moody and David Foster Wallace, last year's young literary comet. Only two months after Franzen's complaint, Wallace made a connection with Infinite Jest, his 1,000-page opus about an early 21st century North America splintered by drugs, fanatics and a business ethic so venal that even the months of the year have product names...
...also that year that we all caught comet fever; Halley's had come to town. For several weeks we endured arctic temperatures, looking skyward until our necks were sore. Everyone ooed and ahhed, and I think I was the only kid in town who admitted to not being able to see the damn thing. Finally, one frigid night I looked through the telescope at the high school and saw a pea-sized white blob. I'm told it was the comet, but it looked more like frost on the lens to me. I knew from school that we wouldn...
...occasional fact. Not wanting to miss out on the chance of four millennia, I turned my eyes skyward yet again. The same pea-sized white blob hung in the sky, and it was only after I cleaned my eyeglasses that I was convinced it was indeed a comet and not a piece of lint from the laundry room--piece of lint whose death toll was presently 39. I shared my disappointment with a companion, but her reverence was incorrigible. Others, too, seemed mesmerized and hypnotized by a cosmic aura of awe and amazement. I began to feel a little inadequate...