Word: giant
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...system, built in collaboration with Silicon Graphics, AT&T, Scientific-Atlanta and a long list of subcontractors, is almost dizzyingly complex. Huge racks of computer disk drives called file servers store movies and other "video assets" in digital form. Giant switches called ATMS shuttle prodigious quantities of data at blistering speeds. A set-top box with five times the computing power of a top-of-the-line IBM PC downloads images from the server at the rate of 30 pictures a second. Press a button on the remote, and the signal travels through cable-TV lines, fiber-optic wires, switches...
Broadway isn't the only place for grand spectacle. At the Treasure Island hotel in Las Vegas, that Mecca of excess, the Montreal troupe Cirque du Soleil has created a gorgeously surreal, thrillingly theatrical pageant. Acrobats mingle with Adam and Eve, spaceship Earth and a giant snail in a fantasy of rebirth. It plays like the fever dream of some millennial impresario. Call him Siegfried Roy Webber...
...wide as Swamp Angel, was "scarcely taller than her mother" at birth, and -- though her father gave her a shiny new ax to play with in her cradle -- "was a full two years old before she built her first log cabin." Her epic mud wrestle with the giant bear Thundering Tarnation has the rowdy, mile-wide quality of the Paul Bunyan tales: the combatants fall asleep after days of pummeling each other, and "Tarnation snored louder than a rockslide, while Angel snored like a locomotive in a thunderstorm. Their snoring rumbled through the earth, tumbling boulders and shaking trees loose...
...molecular level, and the mapping of the canine genome is at last under way." Scientists have located the genes that cause muscular dystrophy in golden retrievers, and "shaking pup" syndrome in Welsh springer spaniels. They're working on identifying the genes responsible for failure-to-thrive metabolic problems in giant Schnauzers, bleeding disorders in Scottish terriers and Doberman pinschers, and the hereditary deafness that affects about 30% of Dalmatians. And they believe hip dysplasia, the crippling condition that afflicts Jake the golden retriever and his kin, may be the result of several defective genes working in concert -- not an unusual...
President Clinton -- while pitching most of his remarks to domestic politics -- kicked off the 34-nation Summit of the Americas in Miami with a pitch for Western-hemisphere nations to join a giant free-trade zone by 2005. "This is a magic moment -- let us seize it," Clinton told an assembly of summit organizers and U.S. and foreign business leaders, stressing that the "partnership for prosperity" would create jobs at home. U.S. trade officials admit that such a trade zone is most valuable in U.S. political terms for the moment, since draft language doesn't call for final international negotiations...