Word: last
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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When Jose Bove was growing up in Berkeley, Calif., he was particularly fond of American birthday cakes. "I thought they were fantastic," he says, "with all the icing and decorations and candles. What kid could resist that?" He was apparently less taken with hamburgers. Last August the radical French farm leader led a commando attack on a McDonald's outlet under construction in the southern town of Millau. Armed with crowbars, sledgehammers, wrenches and screwdrivers, these crusaders for the French way of life dismantled the fast-food franchise...
...call mathematics a fin-de-siecle craze would be a bit of an exaggeration, but there is something remarkable about how the most arcane of academic disciplines has finally implanted itself firmly in popular culture. The trend began in 1994 when Princeton University's Andrew Wiles proved Fermat's Last Theorem, a cantankerous problem that had defeated the best mathematical minds for more than 350 years. Not since Archimedes ran naked from his bathtub shouting "Eureka!" has a mathematician received more publicity. PEOPLE magazine put him on its list of "the 25 most intriguing people of the year...
...half past the raging stage. Yet talk to him about his creation Lara Croft--buxom heroine of the Tomb Raider series of computer games--and his face lights up with a naughty-boy grin. "Lara's changed fairly significantly," he says of her latest outing, Tomb Raider IV: The Last Revelation. "She's got a bottom now. She's got cheeks. She's smoother. Now she exists just as we first imagined...
When Tomb Raider IV hit stores last week, you were also able to pick up a Lara Croft comic, a Lara Croft candy bar, a Lara Croft action doll. A Pokemon-esque Lara Croft card game is selling briskly, as is Lara's Book (a cultural dissection by Generation X author Douglas Coupland). Coming soon: a Lara Croft movie from Universal Pictures and 60-ft.-tall Croft wall paintings in major cities across America...
...matter. The Brit female thing worked. Lara was unusual enough to become an icon, and Tomb Raider was addictive enough to prompt millions of men--and, for the first time, large numbers of women--to spend long nights at the console. Smith, who naively thought he'd seen the last of Tomb Raider, had to spend many more long nights (two years' worth per game) devising enough fiendish traps and puzzles for three sequels...