Word: flooded
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...that it takes repeated batterings to shake people's tenacity. Natural disasters do not often occur in so predictable a manner. Mary Skipper is getting ready to replace her mobile home near Charleston, S.C., in a spot hit hard by Hurricane Hugo in September. "I know this is a flood plain," she explains. "But something like Hugo may never happen again for another 100 years...
...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...
...terror lies first in the surprise. An earthquake is hidden from one moment to the next, as the future is hidden, as God is hidden. The event does not announce itself as most other disasters do, as a hurricane does, or a flood, or even an erupting volcano, which is after all hard to miss as dangerous geography. A plague too arrives more slowly. That is no consolation, but at least the mind and nerves are prepared. The event proceeds in a logical continuum of developing bad news...
Though cameras were always pulled out for calamities -- the Johnstown flood, the San Francisco earthquake -- the subtler processes of the century left their mark on the glass plates too. The growth of industry, the very geometry of the industrial landscape were news. The diagonals of an iron truss or the plunging lines of a new bridge told of the spreading dominion of industry and technology in a way that words never could. Photography came along just in time to record the great expansion of empire by the colonial powers as they stretched toward the Pacific. When the U.S. moved westward...
...flood of picture taking brought profound changes to magazine illustration. Pictures assumed a narrative life of their own. Photographers were inspired by the analytical vision of abstract art and even more by the use of multiple perspectives in movies. Photography retained its enormous claim to objectivity in recording the world, but personal vision gained a new importance. German critics summed up the rapid evolution with the term Foto- auge (photo-eye), or photography as a mechanical form of seeing...