Word: greates
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Mark Twain never saw anything like this. When he piloted on the river more than a century ago, he wrote mostly about storms and floods and the excess water curving and shifting over banks and through new channels. He knew, though, the majesty of the great valley. "The basin of the Mississippi is the body of the nation," is the description that starts his classic river chronicle. That remains true today and is reason for the profound concern...
...stream, which usually carries storms across California into the Midwest, sucking moisture up from the Gulf. But this year its larger current swung north to Hudson Bay, its lesser branch south to Mexico, leaving the midlands arid and hot. Now, after nearly three months of deprivation, the great Missouri-Mississippi watershed has fused into a giant arc of aching thirst. The heartland bower of James Whitcomb Riley and Edgar Lee Masters, of Indiana and Illinois, has received less than half the normal spring rainfall. The soft night lawns are brown crackling grist. The old swimming holes have evaporated...
From the air, a dry spell of even this magnitude is hard to see with the naked eye. Some fields are parched out, and crops are plainly scraggly. But the patchwork of greens and golds still reels by under jet wings heading west. The great shoulders of the Rockies have some snow on them still. It takes a closer inspection and a conditioned eye for full understanding. The trees of Minneapolis hide devastated home lawns and gardens. Out West, dry-weather weeds have sprung up in the draws of prairie pastures, adding deceptive color. All through the Midwest are fields...
...solid-fuel rocket boosters and the external fuel tank. This week plans call for the entire structure to be moved, at a glacial pace, more than four miles to launching pad 39B and poised for launch in late August or September. "The test results look good. The hardware looks great," said Deputy Operations Director Robert Crippen. "We're in the countdown to launch...
...think eating lots of squid precludes having a wonderful day, you would clearly have been in the minority at the Great Monterey Squid Festival, held on Saturday and Sunday of Memorial Day weekend. The fifth and most successful of these annual celebrations, this year's event drew some 23,500 devotees of the delicacy the Italians call calamari, whose habits were described by Aristotle in his Historia Animalium sometime before...