Word: luck
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...nation...that had the lion's heart. I had the luck to be called upon to give the roar...
What's scary is the unknown terrorist. Last week's case of Administration anxiety came largely from the sudden appearance of a 32-year-old Algerian named Ahmed Ressam. Trying to sneak into the U.S. from Canada, he was caught by luck as much as diligence. The 3,000-odd-mile northern border of the U.S. is as porous as Swiss cheese. Some checkpoints are screened only by video camera. The one at Port Angeles, Wash., where Ressam was arrested, might have seemed like a sleepy, lax place to cross into the U.S. But around...
Kaufman rightly objected to being called a comedian. But he was, perhaps, a mordant self-satirist, perpetually in touch with, loving and loathing, his inner child, the lonely little Long Island boy, consoled by his obsessive interest in the trashiest manifestations of pop culture. It was his luck to come on the scene in the '70s, just as a generation that had been shaped--blighted--by the same pop materials was arriving at self-consciousness. The natural impulse of the members of that generation was to nostalgize pop culture and their own innocent response to it. On the other hand...
...Bayeux Tapestry, the astonishing embroidered storyboard of the Battle of Hastings, one can see Edward the Confessor of England dying in January 1066 and Harold Godwinson, an earl, enthroned. A woolen comet (Halley's) streams across a linen sky, auguring bad luck. William, who believed the English crown had been promised him, lost no time. Five hundred vessels eventually ferried 7,000 men and their 2,000 mounts. Contrary winds delayed the force on the French side of the English Channel for 15 days--just long enough for Norway to launch its own 300-ship attack on the north...
Notoriously parsimonious--except for her own fashions--Elizabeth hated war for its costly wastefulness, yet embroiled England ineffectually in the long Continental struggles of the Counter-Reformation. When the Catholic threat of Spain reached its apogee in 1588, her penny pinching nearly cost England its independence before luck and the skill of her sailors defeated the Spanish armada. Yet at the moment of imminent invasion, she dressed in a silver breastplate to address her troops and imbue them with her dauntless courage. "I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman," Elizabeth said, "but I have...