Word: flashing
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...supposed to have a script, and had mislaid it. I was supposed to hear cues, and no longer did. I was meant to know the plot, but all I knew was what I saw: flash pictures in variable sequence, images with no "meaning" beyond their temporary arrangement, not a movie but a cutting-room experience...
...essays and novels reflect this fatalism, but she is nonetheless alive to others' sorrows and enthusiasms. The destruction of Amado's orchids in "Quiet Days in Malibu" by a flash fire confirms Didion's view of life as an unpredictable but inevitable series of large and small tragedies. In "The White Album," Didion notes that neither she nor her friends was surprised at the news of the Sharon Tate murders. She walks through her days anticipating horror, sporadically paralyzed by migraines, dreaming of "the children burning in the locked car in the supermarket parking lot...the freeway sniper who feels...
Suddenly, a shrill alarm shatters the control room's silence. Red lights flash on the instrument panel. One of the reactor's steam condensers has lost its vacuum, causing a turbine "trip," or shutoff. No longer is the reactor able to shed heat produced by its radioactive core. Ominously its temperature climbs, threatening to boil away the coolant. Unless something is done fast, there may be a meltdown, spilling lethal radioactive gases...
...prove his point, Janacek moves to the rear of the control room, glances at a panel with such legends as FEED-WATER PUMP FAILURE, STEAM-LINE RUPTURE and RELIEF-VALVE FAILURE, and presses a button. The effect is jarring. Alarms give off an almost hysterical shrill. Control-panel lights flash, and overhead lights dim. He has simulated the rupture of a 21-in.-diameter water line, which can empty the reactor of vital cooling water in less than a minute...
Some plays are the comic books of the theater. All of their characters are caricatures. Their situations have the labeled banality of canned clichés. The dialogue is Cro-Magnon English. In scene after scene the ludicrous and the dreadful intersect at some flash point where the playgoer's ribs collapse in implausible laughter...