Word: downtown
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...eastern side of the city. The occasional finger of white African sunlight that pokes through the haze falls on piles of dead bodies. The soft sands of Lumley beach, which sits on the north edge of town, are blanketed with dead soldiers, and the tranquil bay that lies between downtown and the airport is an oily, grisly mess, teeming with floating bodies and body parts...
Into Saturday night, ECOMOG fought to maintain control. Since most of the R.U.F. leaders had been killed in the previous few weeks of fighting, most rebel positions in the city were held by 15- and 16-year-old boys, who looted and burned huge swaths of downtown. ECOMOG forces patrolling Freetown's main streets were continually harassed by Kalashnikov-wielding teenagers who slipped from dark alleys, machine-gunned them for 15 or 30 seconds and then slipped away again. After sunset the teenagers, many of them high on local hallucinogens, set houses on fire--night candles, they called them...
...digital apocalypse, like most things, is a matter of perspective. Consider: for all the new machines that potentially won't work, there are plenty of old machines--dusty, neglected, but serviceable--that will. John Fryer, who runs a downtown-Livingston bookstore, brags that his venerable rotary telephones are invulnerable to power failures because they contain, like others of their vintage, small electric generators powered by their dials. Fryer kept the clunky phones out of old-fashioned thriftiness, not grim survivalism, and now he's glad he did. Says Fryer: "Everything in the store is analog, from the adding machines...
...make little baby clones for infertile couples. Then last September--"to defuse criticism that I'm taking advantage of desperate women"--he announced that he would first clone himself. Now he says he will re-create his wife Gloria, an office worker at a FORTUNE 500 company in downtown Chicago. "She's not as excited about it as I am," he says without a hint of irony, "but she's willing to help...
...typical Iraqi bravado. Shops show off wares that only black marketeers can afford to buy, and in the night-vision goggles of American pilots, they signal Iraq's defiance. Streetlamps cast a reassuring sulfur glow, though only a modest number of cars race the highway behind al-Rasheed Hotel downtown. It is not that Iraqis are afraid or battened down in their bomb shelters. There is little to keep them out after dark, even on a peaceful night before the holy month of Ramadan. Baghdad is worn down by an eight-year-old embargo. Iraqis hurry home at nightfall...