Word: cosmically
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...comet had again swung into view, but just barely. At Kitt Peak National Observatory near Tucson one night last month, several large telescopes tracked the approaching comet, projecting images that flickered across television monitors. But like countless amateur stargazers around the world, the astronomers wanted to see the cosmic celebrity with their own eyes. Huddled in the chill mountain air outside an observatory dome, necks craned, binoculars raised, they and a group of visitors searched a patch...
Potluck Supper literally takes place in the mind of its lead character, the neurotic host (David Prum) whose anxiety about preparing for a dinner party provides the backdrop of this cosmic comedy of manners. In the first scene, Prum stands center stage with his head inside a miniature version of his living room, nervously shooting the breeze but getting tripped up by his moribund sense of humor. You know the scene: you're standing at the potato dip and the only small-talk subjects that come to mind have to do with dead cats and getting your stomach pumped...
...Argus, a Government- sponsored undertaking to comb the universe for alien messages. The time is 1999, when, in Sagan's irrepressibly progressive vision, the President of the U.S. is a woman, and the world's smartest man is a Nigerian. The aliens, however, are stereotypical. By the time their cosmic call is returned, it is clear they are vastly more intelligent and wiser than we are; among other things, they do not seem to have deregulated their telephone system...
...Palomar is puppet voyeur of the earthly, the bizarre, the cosmic. Frustrated by the naked breast of a sunbathing woman who misreads his truly beachcombing intentions, confused in his reading of the heavens against a cardboard constellation chart, he shuns both celestial bodies and tanned ones, for the "certainty" in the refraction index of his own clumsy corrective lenses. Like a misplaced, compulsive Descartes, checking the stars to make sure nothing has changed, Mr. Palomar makes rules for himself: he must stick to what he sees...
...watching: a pair of mating tortoises, giraffes in a zoo, the cuts of meat in a butcher shop, the ruins of a Toltec shrine in Mexico, the flight of migrant starlings in his native Rome. Even while tending the grounds of his summer home, he feels the key to cosmic understanding within his reach: "He no longer thinks of the lawn: he thinks of the universe. He is trying to apply to the universe everything he has thought about the lawn...