Word: geologist
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...eyeblink in geologic time, a writer for the New Yorker hit on a notion for a Talk of the Town piece, one of those short, graceful, somewhat owlish essays that in those days were told with a royally editorial "we." John McPhee's excellent idea was to collar a geologist friend, visit the rock walls of a recent highway cut not far from Manhattan and relate what the newly naked stone told the geologist...
...spectacularly orogenous and deeply benthic volume Annals of the Former World (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 696 pages; $35), it required most of the next 20 years. It morphed from one road cut to a nation of them across the continental trail of Interstate 80, and from one bemused geologist to dozens. Readers had stamina then, and over the years the New Yorker printed McPhee's emerging rock opera as a succession of four-parters: Basin and Range, In Suspect Terrain, Rising from the Plains, Assembling California. Farrar, Straus published the same material as books, and the oddity was that...
...piece, a desperate, eloquent defense of wild places, and it is not surprising to find that his first novel, Where the Sea Used to Be (Houghton Mifflin; 464 pages; $25), grows from the same earth. He used the identical title for a short story about a mystical oil geologist who, like the novel's hero, can see oil beneath mountains. The lead female character, a woman strong enough to ski for miles carrying a grown man on her back, could be the daughter of a yeti-like succubus in his story The Myths of Bears. And the novel's wilderness...
...Comedy Arts Festival in Aspen, Colo., two weeks ago, "I guess I had a problem with flushing the toilet. Like I would go poo and then wouldn't flush it. And my mother would yell at me and yell at me. And so my dad--the geologist on South Park is my dad--my dad said, 'Well, Trey, you need to flush the toilet because if you don't, Mr. Hankey is going to come out and kill you.' And I'm like, 'What do you mean?' And he goes, 'Well, it just sits there, and you flush...
Before he died last summer in an auto accident while studying impact craters in Australia, geologist Eugene Shoemaker recalled that the biggest disappointment of his life was "not going to the moon and banging on it with my own hammer." Shoemaker, a famed expert in lunar science, had dreamed of becoming the first geologist to accompany Apollo astronauts to the moon. But because of health problems, he had to settle for training astronauts in geology and analyzing the lunar rocks they brought back...