Word: magical
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
When all the athletes were finally in place, standing in the spot where 2,162,000 liters of magic lake water had been drained in just three minutes, Bjork performed a song about mother earth while her dress morphed into a map of the world that stretched over the heads of the athletes. It was the largest printed photograph ever. Bjork was followed by Gianna Angelopoulos-Daskalaki, the woman widely credited with saving the Athens Games from their own inertia in 2000. Angelopoulos-Daskalaki, who smiles even when she's not smiling, got Greek pride going again and welcomed...
...land on precisely the web page that they always wanted but could never find. When Sergey Brin and Larry Page created Google, this was their way of showing us just how good they could be - like two kids bouncing into their parent?s den to show off a new magic trick...
...Games in the stadium at Olympia by U.S. silver medallist Adam Nelson on Wednesday. The fact that he'd just suffered a heartbreaking loss of the gold medal to Ukrainian Yuriy Bilonog in the finals seconds did nothing to dim his enthusiasm for an event whose venue captured the magic of the Athens Olympiad. And it was shared by competitors, coaches and spectators...
Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell is set in an alternative version of early 19th century England, one in which magic is real but on the wane, to the point that there are only two practicing sorcerers left in England. The pair are a pleasing study in contrasts: Mr. Norrell is exceptionally learned but shy and fussy. "He is," a character remarks, "at one and the same time, the most remarkable man of the age and the most tedious." Strange is charming, young, fashionable and romantic. Clarke could have called the book Sense and Sensibility if the title weren't already taken...
Clarke is an extremely funny writer, which is rare in fantasy--Rowling is sometimes goofy, but Clarke is genuinely witty. But what really sets Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell apart is its treatment of magic. Clarke's magic is a melancholy, macabre thing, confabulated out of snow and rain and mirrors and described with absolute realism; it's even documented with faux-scholarly footnotes. When spells are cast (and they frequently are--Clarke isn't one of those stingy fantasists who doles out, say, one spell every hundred pages), they come with consequences of both the intended and the unintended varieties...