Word: homeric
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Disciplining wrongdoers with arduous physical activity stretches as least as far back as the ancient Greeks - and it's always really sucked. Homer's Odyssey recalls the plight of Sisyphus, the Corinthian King consigned to nudging a boulder up a hill for all eternity; according to the gods' twisted decree, when he neared the top of the hill, the rock would come tumbling down. Rehabilitation in 19th century England took a page from the Greeks' prescription for soul-crushing drudgery: inmates would be forced to trek endlessly on treadmills, pass their days turning purposeless cranks for thousands of revolutions...
...perfect conclusion to the search. A life-long Braves fan, it is only fitting that I see them play...twice. It's almost a passing of the torch. And what games these were. Both went into extra innings and each ended with a Brave knocking a game-winning homer. It was baseball at its finest...
...Percy Bysshe and Mary) followed scientific breakthroughs like sports scores. Holmes traces echoes of the astronomical work of William Herschel, who discovered Uranus, through Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner ("the stars that still sojourn, yet still move onward") and into Keats' "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer": "Then I felt like some watcher of the skies/When a new planet swims into...
...plain not fancy. He began as a teenage stringer for Houston newspapers and then made his way into radio before being hired by the United Press, the spunky cousin of the Associated Press. During World War II, Walter was UP's man in London, a colleague of the legendary Homer Bigart of the New York Herald Tribune, later of the New York Times; Andy Rooney, then with Stars and Stripes; and Ed Murrow, the incomparable voice of CBS News. Murrow was stunned when Cronkite turned down an offer to become one of Murrow's Boys, as the CBS all-star...
...while he enjoyed the celebrity of a Clark Gable or a Lou Gehrig. Newspapers breathlessly limned his exploits as he made sizable withdrawals from vaults throughout the Midwest, using his machine gun as collateral. But killing cops puts a man at greater risk than hitting a homer or kissing the girl. Dillinger stirred the hunter's blood in J. Edgar Hoover, the young director of the FBI, and Hoover's most resourceful agent, Melvin Purvis. They, and Dillinger too, knew that a life of crime was not a profession from which one gracefully retired. Purvis and his team caught...