Word: lightful
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...inland sea--or more rarely in "pipes," or tubes, the fossilized backbones of archaic freshwater squid. The paradox of the stuff is that although it is so brilliantly colored, it has no color of its own. It's a solid diffraction grating, and the color you see is the light dispersed and reflecting through it. John Smart, the miner in whose mine we filmed, waxes reflective about this. "The opal's just a bloody illusion. It's as though you're spending your life down here digging for something that doesn't actually exist...
...cliff, 300 ft. above the desert floor. There are purply black mesas before and behind you. Exactly above the center of the largest one, you see Venus, the Morning Star, burning in a deep violet sky. Nothing moves. No wind, no sound, only bitter cold. As the light begins to glow on the eastern horizon, you see an immense desert plain, flat as water--it is, in fact, the bed of an ancient inland sea. And it stretches without interruption, without a building or any other sign of human habitation, 2,000 miles to the northeast until it reaches...
...silence is absolute. As the light gathers, it is sublime and scary. When the low, fretted bars of cloud on the eastern horizon go from gray to molten gold, seconds before the sun's rim peers over the desert, it's the closest thing I have ever experienced to being in outer space. Then, as the light floods the plain, its birds begin to move: the black crows, the white cockatoos uttering their first tentative dawn screams, the rainbow lorikeets. A hawk sails over, and a mob of kangaroos hop by. A new day, the merest crumb of eternity...
...revised a hastily dashed off Post-it note to my wife ("I'm at the gym--back by 7:30 or so") to read: "I'm engaged in my daily somatic aggrandizement. I'll see you when the crepuscular light imbues your hair with its magenta indolence...
This time, sociopathic white supremacism was driving not a pickup in Texas but a light blue Ford in the Windy City. On Sunday night, Benjamin Nathaniel Smith, 21, an activist member of the anti-minority World Church of the Creator suspected in four drive-by shootings Friday, Saturday and Sunday in Illinois and Indiana, apparently killed himself after being chased by police. In his wake he left two people dead -- one former Northwestern basketball coach Ricky Byrdsong, who was black, the other a Korean-American shot down outside a church. The chain: shots fired at three black men Saturday afternoon...