Word: manias
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Lear has partly written, a new movie due out early next year. It stars Ryan O'Neal as a burglar whose passion, as luck would have it, is chess. The original title was "The Thief Who Came to Dinner." Now, their eyes aglow at the thought of the mania sweeping the country after the Fischer-Spassky match in Iceland, Yorkin and Lear are eagerly dreaming up a good chess title...
...whole dynasty of memorial church interiors. There were a few fine flower painters, like Balthasar van der Ast, whose elaborate portrait of variegated tulips in a vase could not, as the catalog interestingly points out, have been done from life. (At the height of the Dutch tulip mania, such rare blooms would never have been cut for a painter; he would have had to draw them in the garden.) One of Rembrandt's more gifted pupils, Carel Fabritius, worked for a time in Delft until he had the spectacularly awful luck to be blown to pieces in the accidental explosion...
...misery loves company, investors hammered by the current slump in tech stocks can take solace in the tale of one of the original financial bubbles. The "Tulip Mania" exhibition at the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, Calif. (through July 23), displays a collection of watercolor paintings of tulips from the 1630s, along with intriguing information about the frenzy over them. During that decade, the price of a rare tulip bulb escalated to as much as 5,200 guilders. (By comparison, Rembrandt's fee for The Night Watch was 1,600 guilders.) Bulbs were used as dowries and exchanged for shiploads...
Play doesn't just make kids happy, healthy and human. It may also make them smarter, says Rosenfeld. Today's mania for raising young Einsteins, he observes, might have destroyed the real Einstein--a notorious dreamer who earned poor grades in school but somewhere in his frolics divined the formula for the relationship between matter and energy. Play refreshes and stimulates the mind, it seems. And "frequent breaks may actually make kids more interested in learning," according to Rhonda Clements, a Hofstra University professor of physical education...
Ground zero for ranch mania is the hill country. Since 1994, the rugged, picturesque hills west of Austin and San Antonio have been Texas' hottest destination for retirees and investors alike--in large part because of its temperate climate. Tech millionaires from Dell, Compaq and Microsoft, tobacco-settlement lawyers, oil- and gasmen (back in the money, thanks to the California energy crisis) have all snapped up parcels from 50 acres to 100 acres, replacing ranch houses with mansions, throwing up 10-ft.-high fences to corral herds of exotic animals--and changing a way of life forever. There are traffic...