Word: dirt
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...tackle the Pyramid of the Moon. Like most Mesoamerican pyramids, this one was built like an onion. Explains Cowgill: "They would build a small pyramid, then build a larger one over it and then build a third one after that." As a result, the interior is almost solid dirt and rubble, with no distinct passageways. This makes the going slow and expensive. It took the archaeologists 3 1/2 months to reach the burial chamber, which is about 90 ft. inside the pyramid...
...Espy's who was meant to be the prosecution's strongest witness, turned on Smaltz on the stand and said he'd agreed to become his "puppet" only after three years of "storm-trooper" tactics by the independent counsel. "God knows, if I had $30 million, I could find dirt on you, sir," Douglas told Smaltz in front of the jury. (The amount Smaltz actually spent, through March, was $17.5 million...
These attractions were better than any movie in his eyes--three dimensional and without narrative problems. They were, indeed, better than life, for they offered false but momentarily thrilling experiences in a sterile, totally controlled environment from which dirt, rudeness, mischance (and anything approaching authentic emotion) had been totally eliminated. All his other enterprises had to be delivered into the possibly uncomprehending world. When Disneyland opened in 1955, that changed: he now had his own small world, which people had to experience on his terms...
...fearsome Martin Davis, who became CEO of Simon & Schuster's parent company, Gulf + Western. Meanwhile in the Bronx, Yankee owner George Steinbrenner was taking delight in firing people. He is so paradigmatic of impetuous power (throwing tantrums, bad-mouthing employees in the press, hiring a spy to dig up dirt on Dave Winfield) that he's simply called the Boss--and not in a hip, Bruce Springsteen...
Except the prose. "I rode towards Inkerman with my chin buried in my shirt, smelling myself for warmth," Dr. Potter recalls as the novel marches toward its final, appalling snapshot. "Midst the dirt and the staleness I detected the frail scent of cornflowers." Like the unblinking young Myrtle, forced to pose for a picture with a dead man, Bainbridge faces the most shadowy aspects of human nature head on, and demands that her readers do the same...