Word: midwesterners
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...that the New Madrid fault is a failed rift, or break, in the North American plate. Had it progressed further, the embryonic gap might have created a body of water like the Red Sea, which is slowly widening into an ocean. But hundreds of millions of years ago, the Midwestern rift stopped growing. The New Madrid fault today simply marks a weak spot in the thick midcontinental crust, which periodically ruptures under the pressure exerted by the migrating North American plate. It could take 500 to 1,000 years for enough force to accumulate to trigger a really big quake...
...long drive from Wisconsin to Arizona, where he has been told a better life beckons, Wade begins to realize that his parents have not only pulled up stakes but are racing to leave each other as well. The gun that introduces The Steward never goes off. Instead the Midwestern farm boy called upon to protect his grandparents, mother and brother from a lunatic reported to be in the area encounters nothing but a heightened awareness of the tedium of family routines...
...their ice skates in the off-season. In 1987 Rollerblade decided to market the skates as a fitness product for exercise buffs. Rollerblades were slimmed down and painted a fashionable neon. The company also launched a secret marketing strategy. Realizing that trends start and spread quickly in California, the Midwestern company gave away hundreds of Rollerblades to skate-rental shops along the beach in Los Angeles. Says Sundet slyly: "So what if the Californians think they invented...
...though it were the result of some exacting distillation. But it is thin and complacent, tarted up with costly materials for the audience of consumers whose pretensions it affects to despise. Its bathos (LACK OF CHARISMA CAN BE FATAL) might have issued from the warm heart of some Midwestern creative- writing course. Her phrasing (IDEALS ARE REPLACED BY CONVENTIONAL GOALS AT A CERTAIN AGE) is like a Hallmark card rewritten in academe. Holzer may sometimes remind you of Seneca (EXPIRING FOR LOVE IS BEAUTIFUL BUT STUPID) and sometimes of Bakunin (PRIVATE PROPERTY CREATED CRIME). But down deep...
Like Prospero, Stern is a magician who confronts unruly influences in a brave new world. The Midwestern Caliban is played by Hartnell, husband of Stern's sister and his most troublesome client -- a "small-town boy made good, gone bad." To see him on the floor of the commodity exchange is to observe a force of nature: "He stepped into the tiered levels of the pits, shaking hands and tossing greetings like Frank Sinatra onstage, commanding the same reverence, or, in some quarters, subverted loathing." When he admits, "I've always wanted to do what other people wouldn't," Stern...