Word: first
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...earth shakes and rolls under my feet," shrugs novelist Wallace Stegner, a 40-year resident of Los Altos Hills. "It's never particularly alarmed me." Brokers insist that San Francisco's booming real estate market has not subsided. "Obviously the quake was a drawback," concedes Katherine August of First Republic Bancorp, which specializes in loans for luxury homes. "But I don't think it will have a lasting effect on the market. We closed one deal the day after the quake." Says pollster Mervin Field: "Sure it shook people up. But look at the World Series game that was interrupted...
...Scott Fitzgerald once suggested that "the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time." If so, America has developed a perverse sort of genius. Yet both national moods -- the urge to deny risk and the urge to insist that we can protect ourselves from it entirely -- may be traceable to the same unfailing optimism. In a culture that has long fancied itself a New World paradise, disasters seem impossible either to imagine or to tolerate. People expect to conduct the pursuit of happiness along a road that...
...urgently reassessing their plans for coping with the Big One. "What was foremost in many people's minds," says filmmaker Gina Blumenfeld, "was the fact that the San Francisco quake could have just as easily happened here." Residents stocked their homes with bottled water, canned food, batteries and first-aid supplies, snapped up wrenches to turn off the gas and prepacked earthquake kits that sell for $30 to $210. Some of the preparations had an only-in-Hollywood quality. One woman whose emergency gear includes a butane curling iron says she is looking for a battery-operated hair dryer that...
...named Casaubon hides after closing time in a Paris museum called the Conservatoire des Arts et Metiers. Nearby, an enormous pendulum swings silently in the gathering darkness, mute testimony, as a 19th century French scientist named Foucault first demonstrated, to the rotation of the earth. Casaubon is here because he suspects something terrible will happen before dawn. If he is correct, then he and two friends, playful inventors of a plot to rule the world, do not have long to live. In their machinations, have he and his coconspirators accidentally stumbled across some dangerous truth? Or, % perhaps worse, have their...
...first, Casaubon laughs at such lunacies. His merriment is shared by Belbo and Diotallevi, editors at a Milanese publishing house. Given his expertise, Casaubon is hired as a consultant to advise on the endless stream of Templar manuscripts that flood the editorial offices. Eventually, these three scoffers find an amusing way to waste their time. Using Belbo's new word processor, they concoct "the Plan," a plausible scenario revealing a Templar plot to unleash unimaginable powers from the center of the earth in order to rule the world...