Word: edisons
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
DIED. LUTHER VANDROSS, 54, winner of eight Grammys whose heart-tugging ballads made him one of the most celebrated R&B singers of his generation; of undisclosed causes, two years after suffering a massive stroke; in Edison, N.J. In 1981, after years of backing artists like David Bowie and Roberta Flack, he released the first of 15 well-received solo albums, which included such R&B hits as Give Me the Reason, Here and Now and Love Won't Let Me Wait. But he longed for a chart-topping crossover and in 2003 achieved it with the starkly intimate Dance...
Their voices float eerily across more than eight decades, ghostly echoes of a fabled operatic golden age: Nellie Melba, Emma Calvé, Jean de Reszke, Lillian Nordica and others, recorded live at the Metropolitan Opera by an enterprising music lover armed with an Edison cylinder machine. The sound is strictly low-fi, the scratchy surface noise is sometimes overwhelming, and the tantalizing fragments often break off abruptly with a singer in mid-phrase. But listening to them is thrilling, like hearing Lincoln recite the Gettysburg Address...
Gloria Swanson, for example, pays homage to "Mr. Edison . . . and all the people who had any thing to do with an invention. It made it possible to put us all in tin cans, like sardines. We could have been bad actors, it didn't matter. It was the fact of volume . . . you were just shipped everywhere." Louise Brooks, the '20s star who first retired from films in 1931 at the age of 25, recalls everything and glamourizes nothing: "They keep talking now about deterioration and how the films are lost. They always forget that the big way they were lost...
Everyone learned how to kiss from the movies. It is difficult to imagine what people did before Edison for instruction in the subject. They blundered through, no doubt, across centuries of bruised lips and chipped teeth, and the clumsy lunges that end with noses banging, or the woman accidentally mummphing a mouthful of beard...
...growing number of major U.S. companies, including such firms as Exxon, Federal Express, Greyhound Lines, Southern California Edison, TWA, IBM and Lockheed, require all job applicants to pass urinalysis tests that screen for drugs. Some firms demand that experienced workers undergo such tests when the danger of impairment is simply too great to chance. At Rockwell, company pilots and employees who work with explosives are tested once a year...