Word: graceful
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...putting moves on him. Gurney, the prolific chronicler of Wasp life (The Dining Room, Love Letters), seems a bit out of his depth in this plotty drama, which raises (but doesn't grapple with) issues ranging from homosexuality in the military to the origins of Vietnam. But the compact grace of his writing and Daniel Sullivan's delicate direction make it a diverting reminder of the kind of play that doesn't get written much anymore...
...this happen? Who is responsible for the bug we call Y2K? Conventional wisdom goes something like this: back in the 1950s, when computers were the size of office cubicles and the most advanced data-storage system came on strips of punched cardboard, several scientists, including a Navy officer named Grace Murray Hopper, begat a standard programming language called COBOL (common business-oriented language). To save precious space on the 80-column punch cards, COBOL programmers used just six digits to render the day's date: two for the day, two for the month, two for the year...
Wrong. Nothing, especially in the world of computing, is ever that simple. "It was the fault of everybody, just everybody," says Robert Bemer, the onetime IBM whiz kid who wrote much of COBOL. "If Grace Hopper and I were at fault, it was for making the language so easy that anybody could get in on the act." And anybody did, including a group of Mormons in the late '50s who wanted to enlist the newfangled machines in their massive genealogy project--clearly the kind of work that calls for thinking outside the 20th century box. Bemer obliged by inventing...
...dinner when a friend of mine, the writer Ted Morgan, born French as Sanche de Gramont but years ago Americanized, launched into a rhapsody about professional football. Ted, whose Sundays are lost from September to Super Bowl, loves what he calls "the beauty" of pro football--its power, its grace, its intelligence. Ted explains that football is a symbolic re-enactment of America's westward conquest of territory--while baseball is a "post-settlement" enterprise in which each team by turns pacifically yields the field to the other...
Osama bin Laden: The U.S. knows that I have attacked it, by the grace of God, for more than 10 years now. The U.S. alleges that I am fully responsible for the killing of its soldiers in Somalia. God knows that we have been pleased at the killing of American soldiers. This was achieved by the grace of God and the efforts of the mujahedin from among the Somali brothers and other Arab mujahedin who had been in Afghanistan before that. America has been trying ever since to tighten its economic blockade against us and to arrest...