Word: cometed
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...sense, the comet of Limbaugh's rise is the traditional American success story, rewritten for the Reagan-Bush era. Less than a decade ago, he was out of radio and out of work; he was fired from five jobs, broke twice. Now he is rich and famous; this June he was an overnight guest at the White House, and the President carried Limbaugh's bag. His juicy fulminations against "feminazis" (militant pro-abortionists), "commie libs" (pretty much anyone to the left of Archduke Ferdinand) and "environmentalist wackos" (tree huggers) have won him the admiration and courtship of many...
...MILLENNIUM IS THE COMET that crosses the calendar every thousand years. It throws off metaphysical sparks. It promises a new age, or an apocalypse. It is a magic trick that time performs, extracting a millisecond from its eternal flatness and then, poised on that transitional instant, projecting a sort of hologram that teems with the summarized life of the thousand years just passed and with visions of the thousand now to come...
...world no longer has the leisure of the two centuries Mauritius took to develop a conservation ethic. In the past, natural forces shaped the environment. Now, unless a new round of volcanism erupts worldwide or a comet courses in from outer space, human activities will govern the destiny of earth's ecosystems. It may soon be within human power to produce the republics of grass and insects that writer Jonathan Schell believed would be the barren legacy of nuclear war. If humanity fails to seek an accord with nature, population control may be imposed involuntarily by the environment itself...
EVERY AUGUST, COMET SWIFT-TUTTLE LEAVES A spectacular calling card. The trail of dust it sheds on its journey around the sun intersects Earth's orbit and flares into the Perseid meteor shower. The comet itself last appeared in 1862, and based on the orbit calculated at that time, it should have showed up again between 1979 and 1983. It didn...
...last week a Japanese comet hunter spotted a faint blob through powerful binoculars, and a check of its orbit confirmed that Swift-Tuttle had come back at last (it may be barely visible to the naked eye in November). Why so late? A comet's orbit is determined only by careful plotting of its position when it's visible; evidently the 1862 measurements were off. To his credit, Brian Marsden, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, had argued in a 1973 paper that Swift-Tuttle might be late. Few astronomers paid attention -- but Marsden's prediction was only...