Word: ironic
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...most striking is the Red Pyramid, known by the reddish tinge its iron oxide-rich stone takes on in the light of the setting sun. It is the first pyramid in the classic smooth-sided shape so familiar to schoolchildren. Previously, only step-sided pyramids had been built (a shape that was also seen in Mesopotamia and turned up, much later, in Latin America). It was Snefru who conceived of the more difficult smooth-sided form. "He made the intellectual jump," says Rainer Stadelmann, director of the German Archaeological Institute in Cairo. Enlisting two of his sons as architects, Snefru...
...Ngoc and 10 other South Vietnamese at a clearing in North Vietnam, just across the Laotian border. The team, code named Hadley, was supposed to gather intelligence on supply convoys traveling the Ho Chi Minh Trail, but within a day North Vietnamese soldiers began rounding up the commandos. An iron shackle was secured to Pham with a stake driven through the flesh of his leg, and he was taken north. Once in prison, he spent hours hanging upside down in the sun with his jaw held shut by a muzzle. Rats and cockroaches nibbled at the torn flesh...
Roosevelt's optimism about medical research seems, in retrospect, amazing. Doctors could not prevent or treat the poliovirus infection that had paralyzed him nearly twenty years earlier. John Franklin Enders and vaccines were still in the future; the main therapies were iron lungs and warm baths. Most of the staples of modern medicine were also still unknown. Antibiotics. Hormone replacements. Effective drug therapies for psychotic illnesses. Pre-natal testing. Coronary bypass surgery and artifical joints. Also in the future were medications that could have lowered FDR's blood pressure and perhaps forestalled the stroke that killed him less than five...
...power is clout, like the thud of an iron heel. Influence is sway, like being rocked in a hammock. But like the grass in Carl Sandburg's poem, influence has a way of spreading until it overwhelms every bump in its path. Leonid Brezhnev had power. Andrei Sakharov had influence. Power: the FCC. Influence: Howard Stern. What this means is that influence generally gets the last laugh. Alexander Hamilton never attained the presidency. His philosophical antagonist Thomas Jefferson did. But the world has gone Hamilton's way. By most measures, the country we live in today more closely resembles...
Fairbanks died early, at 56, but he had already written his obituary on film. At the end of the 1929 The Iron Mask, when D'Artagnan is killed, his spirit rises and he marches in heaven with the other Musketeers, their burly bonhomie still alive. And Doug is in the middle--smiling as if he'd just won the race, the fight and the girl...