Word: crater
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...mountain seemed calm that fateful morning in January 1993 when Williams and 11 other volcanologists hiked over Galeras' rim to take its pulse--measuring tiny fluctuations in tilt, gravity, gas emissions and other signs of volcanic life. The scientists and a handful of tourists were spread out across the crater, just starting to head back, when a small landslide signaled the start of something...
...yelled to get everyone out," recalls Williams. The scientists scrambled for safety, but it was too late. The earth ripped apart with a sonic boom. Lava bombs as big as cars were blown out of the crater and fell back as molten rain, exploding on impact like mortar shells, ripping through bodies and setting them on fire. Two scientists were instantly vaporized. One was literally cut in half. The exploding mountain shot a nickel-size hole through Williams' skull, mangling his face, setting his clothes afire, breaking one leg and nearly tearing the foot off the other...
...funny how easily the ineffable verges into the insufferable. Conceptual art has a way of churning minor ground into dust, and Ono's work is full of attenuated Surrealist gestures, as in Four Spoons, a plaque holding three spoons and the crater of a missing fourth. In Pointedness, a crystal ball sits atop a Plexiglas pedestal engraved with the words THIS SPHERE WILL BE A SHARP POINT WHEN IT GETS TO THE FAR CORNERS OF THE ROOM IN YOUR MIND. You can try lending weight to this by comparing it to the gentle paradoxes of Zen and the subtleties...
...does every three years, the INTERNATIONAL ASTRONOMICAL UNION has just announced its latest roster of official astronomical names, and as usual, the list is highly eclectic. It's not surprising that CARL SAGAN was honored with a 50-mile-wide crater on Mars. And the names Prospero, Setebos, Stephano, Caliban and Sycorax for five moons of Uranus make sense, since the planet's other moons are mostly named for characters in Shakespeare's The Tempest. Even a moonlet called Petit-Prince is defensible, since it orbits the asteroid Eugenia--and the son of Empress Eugenie and Napoleon III had that...
Five albums later, Sleater-Kinney (Sleater rhymes with crater) is out of storage. Village Voice critic Robert Christgau declares that "they could no more make a bad album than the Rolling Stones in 1967." Journalists routinely describe them as the world's greatest rock-'n'-roll band, a tag once reserved for the Stones. Big record labels have vainly courted them for years. Their new album, All Hands on the Bad One, contains some of the best songs of their career. For all the band's exposure on MTV's 120 Minutes and MTV2, Brownstein is in even heavier rotation...