Word: gnat
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During winter break, finals are just a mental gnat that must be swatted away from time to time as friends ask "how was your semester" and we are forced to reply "I don't know--yet." Mercifully, the change of venue keeps the horror ahead out of consciousness, for the most part...
Exactly two decades ago as the knees stiffen, but a gnat's 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...
...mask slip and acknowledges that his team is the best, the strongest, that the race is theirs to lose. But if he doesn't push them, he believes, no one will. One day, as the Eight begin oaring down the river, he buzzes alongside them like a particularly persistent gnat, detailing the flaws in each woman's stroke, moving from bow to stern. When he is finished, he says, "That was just a quick tour...
...that "for all the anger out there, the vast majority of incumbents will get re-elected." As for Gingrich, she says, he is a good lesson in the perils of political under-estimation. "Just five years ago, he was a backbencher the Democrats thought they could dismiss as a gnat...
...almost from the moment of the ) murder, works such as Barbara Garson's Shakespearean satire MacBird!, Richard Condon's gothic novel Winter Kills and Oliver Stone's film JFK have suggested the story makes a better myth if Lee Harvey Oswald were a cat's-paw instead of a gnat who changed history. The major boon to conspiracy theorists is that the facts do not fit neatly into the Warren Commission scenario. Unfortunately, they fit even less neatly into any alternative, which is why theorists are often driven to suppose that two or more plots intersected...