Word: czech
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Glaser, 57, a vice president at Arthur D. Little, Inc., the Cambridge, Mass., consulting firm, is a Czech-born engineer who first proposed solar satellites twelve years ago. Foreseeing a day when oil would run out and other fossil fuels would become scarce, he suggested placing two giant arrays of solar cells, each about half the size of Manhattan, 22,300 miles above the earth in geosynchronous orbit; there the structures' orbital speed would match the planet's rotation, thus holding the solar powerhouses over the same spot on the ground. Bathed in almost perpetual sunshine, the cells...
...Communist government responded to the publication of this book in Europe last year by revoking the citizenship of Author Milan Kundera. The act was largely symbolic and gratuitous; Kundera had left his repressive homeland and settled in France in 1975. In their own thuggish way, though, the Czech authorities showed they were onto something when they bridled at Kundera's latest work. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is deeply and impressively subversive, in more ways than one. Kundera not only raps the iron knuckles of totalitarianism; he coolly unravels the velvet glove of liberalism...
...share titles (two are called Lost Letters, two The Angels). They all revolve around a small set of preoccupations: the burden of the past and the limits of the healing power of laughter. Time is measured back and forth from the year 1968, when the growing freedom of the Czech people, the fabled Prague Spring, was crushed by the Soviets: "Russian tanks invaded Bohemia." Recent history was revised downward, and those who had been prominent in pushing reforms (including Kundera) found themselves officially erased into nonpersons. Observes one character: "The only reason people want to be masters of the future...
...term robot comes from the Czech word for forced labor and was invented by Karel Capek and popularized in his "fantastic melodrama" of 1921, R.U.R., which stood for Rossum's Universal Robots. These robots look and behave like people and work twice as hard, but since "God hasn't the least notion of modern engineering," as Rossum's general manager puts it, the robots have been built without such impractical attributes as feeling or a soul. First they do all the world's work, then they wage all the world's wars, then they rebel...
...says he'll give them a billion dollars (chomp, chomp, chomp). That's a lot of (chomp) bullshit...Reagan (chomp) can only cite the record (chomp). You talk about hostages (chomp), they're still hostages (chomp)..." The smile gets larger as the daughter of the waitress at the Czech grill downtown mechanically answers that mom will vote for Reagan. "Those people are normally 95 per cent Democrats," he says when the girl leaves to buy saddle shoes with his daughter. His second chin waddles as he sifts through the desk for evidence. "Can't find it, but the poll they...