Word: merest
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...right knee, the tibia and fibula shattered into half a dozen pieces. The right femur broken, the ball joint at the hip damaged. The elbow of the right arm crushed. Several ribs snapped, their sharp ends driven into the lungs. Collarbone and sternum busted. What saved me was the merest fluke: apart from punctured lungs, a few picturesque cuts and some bruising to my liver and heart, the damage was all skeletal, not soft tissue. My brain was intact; ditto my eyes, spine, guts and genitals. It could so easily have been otherwise, and in the weeks since 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, has begun. To see this is to love Australia; it is to become more Australian, even in the act of sensing your own insignificance in the vast, indifferent timescale of the desert...
...that Pablo Picasso dominated Western art in the 20th century is, by now, the merest commonplace. Before his 50th birthday, the little Spaniard from Malaga had become the very prototype of the modern artist as public figure. No painter before him had had a mass audience in his own lifetime. The total public for Titian in the 16th century or Velazquez in the 17th was probably no more than a few thousand people--though that included most of the crowned heads, nobility and intelligentsia of Europe. Picasso's audience--meaning people who had heard of him and seen his work...
...safety inspector), his epochally exasperated wife (Marge of the mountainous blue hair) and three conflicted kids. Bart, 10, is clever and cunning but addled in class; Lisa, 8, is a near genius whose intelligence deprives her of friends; year-old Maggie expresses frazzled wisdom beyond her years with the merest suck on her pacifier...
Such breakthrough works afford the merest hint of Glimp's startling originality. Given his first showing in 1907 at a gallery in Sardinia, Glimp declared his "revolt against the age-old tyranny of the frame" and produced an oil painting (Nude Stretching) that flowed off the canvas onto the wall and floor and then out the door, continuing some 320 ft. along the sidewalk. In 1911 his atonal lesbian operetta, Gal Crazy, caused a riot in Seville, where audience members mistakenly believed they were about to see a bullfight. His kinetic 1928 novel, Run, Fight, Nap, written using only verbs...