Word: icing
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...seasonal averages around 10 times during those same three months, with highs frequently 10 to 20 degrees below normal. Little wonder the Seine-side version of a Potemkin beach - the annual Paris Plage - drew less people and shorter visits per person this year, or that its food, drinks, and ice cream vendors shut up shop reporting disappointing sales. And these weren't the only merchants affected by the weather...
...France. Normandy and Brittany experienced wet, cold weather, while the Atlantic coast from the Bordeaux region down to the Spanish border was doused by record-setting volumes of rain. The impact of that went beyond slumping tanning lotion sales. Between cold demis of beer that never got ordered to ice cream that stayed unscooped; from crops that didn't ripen enough to cultivate into summer fruits like tomatoes and watermelon, French economists say the cold and wet cast a direct, shrinking chill on 30% of the nation's seasonal economic activity...
...hold up. Indeed, last year, comet-dust particles brought back by NASA's Stardust mission showed that the particles had been heated to high temperatures sometime in their lives, which implied that at least the dust in comets might not be primordial. And now it looks like the ice in them isn't either...
Karaoke--and the performance culture it stands for--is not just about ego and entertainment. It's a way of playacting the skills of a networked world, where shyness is a handicap. In the YouTube era, overcoming shyness is the equivalent of killing a mammoth in the Ice Age: an essential survival skill and milestone achievement to be celebrated in picture and song. There is no greater go-to movie scene today than the one in which people throw inhibition to the wind and perform: the climactic Super Freak dance in Little Miss Sunshine, the Age of Aquarius singalong...
...people consider an unhealthy amusement for children. To give me an idea of the level of detail (which is a term of art at Bungie, known as LOD), an audio engineer demonstrates, one by one, the sound of the Master Chief's footsteps, which change when he walks on ice, on gravel, on wood, on rubber, on grass, on sand, on glass and so on. Whenever the Master Chief fires his weapon --he tends to do that a lot--his gun ejects a shiny, jingling shell casing. "We actually are insane," the engineer says, "because we track the impact...