Word: mammothly
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...without telling anybody? President Clinton -- and most of Congress -- want to know. A day after Clinton declassified information on the spy agency's half-completed complex, he told CIA Director James Woolsey and Pentagon officials to figure out why Congress wasn't told about the project's scope and mammoth budget. BTW: If built, the building would house the shadowy National Reconnaissance Office, which oversees spy satellites, and would be one-fifth as big as the Pentagon...
Imagine that one of Shoemaker-Levy 9's bigger pieces -- a mile or two in diameter -- is streaking in at 130,000 m.p.h., except that the target is not Jupiter but Earth. The mammoth chunk of rock and ice tears through the atmosphere and smashes into the ground with the force of 6 million H-bombs, gouging out a crater the size of Rhode Island and throwing so much pulverized real estate into the stratosphere that the sun is blocked for months and Earth goes into a worldwide deep freeze. If the comet hits an ocean, a pall of dust...
Changes have taken place underground as well. In Kentucky's Mammoth Cave, which is 350 miles long, park managers have halted a popular boat ride on an underground river because the disturbance was harming aquatic wildlife, including 12 species of eyeless cave dwellers found nowhere else in the world. Park tour guides have also abandoned a tradition of their forebears, who illuminated recesses of large chambers by throwing torches into them. The kerosene smoke darkened cave walls...
Sometimes the measures are even more drastic. On Memorial Day weekend last year, holiday gridlock at Yosemite forced rangers to close gates, turning away more than 750 vehicles. As a last resort, other parks, including Mammoth Cave, sell reserved tickets through a commercial agency, Mistix. David Mihalic, the former superintendent of Mammoth who now heads Glacier park, thinks rationing makes perfect sense to people: "When you go to Cinema 6 and Terminator 2 is sold out, maybe you go see another movie." Sacrificing some human concerns for nature's well-being may not please everyone, but the loss of paradise...
...vast promotion campaign has already started. The idea, says impresario Tibor Rudas, a specialist in mammoth outdoor attractions, is to reach beyond opera buffs to people "who wouldn't know whether Aida is a spaghetti or a swear word." Commercials that ran during soccer matches on cable TV's ESPN started the hype. A music video that will air around the world shows the singers gleefully kicking around a soccer ball and singing what the backers hope will be the new Nessun dorma: the brindisi, or drinking song, from Verdi's La Traviata. (The promoters have not forgotten their prize...