Word: dust
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...more threatening than an endless expanse of blue, cloudless sky. They unfold in slow motion, a tempo ill suited to daily headlines and TV-news reports. Covering one is like sitting around watching the grass not grow. In The Grapes of Wrath, his 1939 novel about the Depression-era Dust Bowl, John Steinbeck captured the idling, hallucinatory rhythm of drought: "The brown lines on the corn leaves widened and moved in on the central ribs. The weeds frayed and edged back toward their roots. The air was thin and the sky more pale; and every day the earth paled...
...past their car windows. Irrigated fields are still green, overshadowing the brown, crisping lands between and around them. Thanks to lessons learned in the 1930s, farm acreage has long been tilled and cultivated with an eye to soil conservation, to making fields less likely to blow away; the contemporary Dust Bowl is not as dusty as its famous predecessor...
...Smith tells it, the town of Wigan is a place of impacted resentments on the part of the miners and supercilious contempt on the part of the clan that owns the mine workings, ruled by a righteous and merciless cleric, Bishop Hannay. Into this nexus of bitterness and coal dust comes Jonathan Blair, a penniless, malarial and more than slightly gin-sodden African explorer. Blair, who was born in Wigan, would rather be anywhere else, but the wealthy bishop, whose hobby is African exploration--this is the era of Burton, Speke and the Mountains of the Moon--has promised Blair...
...overcome a lifetime habit of thinking words are the enemy. Up until now they have seemed that way. Words muck up deals, create divisions, draw battle lines, are misunderstood. When you are a legislator, silence is your friend. The unspoken word never has to be taken back. (And dust-bowl Kansas wasn't exactly a place for airy chat; you grew up in the last age of yup and nope. "Lost the farm." "Bad." "Still tryin'." "Good.") Now it's all different. When you run for President, words are your friend, your only friend. You must "martial them to fight...
...another possibility, says UCLA meteorologist Roger Wakimoto, is that the tornadoes typical of supercell storms are formed by the same mechanism that creates the smaller, less destructive funnel clouds known as waterspouts, landspouts and dust devils. These twisters all build their vortexes not from the clouds down but from the ground up. They are triggered, Wakimoto says, by low-lying eddies of air that are perturbed by a fast-moving front or some other local disturbance. When a supercell storm passes over such an area, swirling air near the ground could easily be sucked into the updraft and spun...