Word: comprehend
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...lost sense that leadership was possible in the presidency. But he stayed a term too long. As he shouted befuddled Hooverisms over the roar of his helicopter last week or doddered precariously through his press conference, Reagan appeared embarrassingly irrelevant to a reality that he could scarcely comprehend. Stripped of his ability to create economic illusions, stripped of his chance to play host to Mikhail Gorbachev, he elicited the unnerving suspicion that he was the emperor with no clothes...
Union leaders probably would have been wise to delay the strike until the World Series was over. Still, selfish players, such as Mark Gastineau of the Jets and Lawrence Taylor of the Giants--who couldn't comprehend the union's earlier efforts in their ability to sign mega-contracts and bolted the picket lines--need to be faulted for disrupting union solidarity and making it impossible for the Player's Association to stand together through the winter...
...kings and, yes, even gods who figure in his tales. At one point a deity confronts the poet who is purportedly narrating the epic and demands, "Vyasa, which of us has invented the other?" That is art at its most self- aggrandizing. Yet how indeed does man come to comprehend anything beyond his immediate world if not through the artist? The Mahabharata is studded with such observations and moves at a pace leisurely enough to allow audiences to ponder them a moment -- but not too deeply -- before being caught up in the next fable, the next tapestry brought to life...
...Says Craig Upson, a graphics specialist who last August left a commercial animation firm to join the staff of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois: "You find yourself lost in this maze of data because suddenly you can compute far more than you can comprehend." The route to comprehension, he says, is to turn the numbers into images...
...jazz and the Harvard Jazz Band. Trumpeter Lester Bowie, sporting a white silk dressing gown and purple pants, thrilled the crowd with his "avant pop" antics. The Jazz Band, playing with all the guests, gave a remarkable performance, not to mention a few outstanding solos. I fail to comprehend why The Crimson neglected to include these elements...