Word: mountainous
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Sliding Forests. Disaster began with a cyclonic storm that poured millions of tons of water into the Arno, the Po and their tributaries. In the mountain resort of Alleghe, a hotel employee reported that the nearby lake was overflowing its banks, pushing whole forests down the sides of the mountain. In the Trentino region near Austria, 30,000 persons were left homeless. The torrent uprooted vineyards in Chianti-producing Tuscany and massacred livestock in a region that produces most of Italy's meat. In Venice, it heavily damaged some 7,000 shops, though canal-traveling Venetians were better able...
...Czech farm hand (he was born Jan Ludwig Hoch), Maxwell left school at ten, left his family's one-room Carpathian mountain home at 16 to join the underground fighting Hitler. Later he made his way to Britain, joined the British army as a private, left as a captain. With the profits of some shrewd postwar trading in German scientific manuscripts, he bought Pergamon in 1951 for $36,400, cajoled experts from all over the world into writing scientific tomes for him. Fluent in nine languages including Russian, he won a virtual corner on rights to Soviet scientific works...
...think so much of Mom: "She was a portentous tart with promiscuous tastes, a sensual temple-cat used to visiting sepulchral chambers in the dead of night." He dreams at night and has hallucinations by day that mother is a "sphinx, near Thebes, on a bald and spiky mountain ... a hermaphrodite in the guise of an animal." In fact, Mother is pretty smelly or, as the book prefers, "odorous...
Most of the desert air is pushed through the mountain passes (one of which, the Santa Ana canyon, gave the wind its name), where it picks up speed before roaring out into the Los Angeles basin at velocities as high as 100 m.p.h. The remainder flows over the mountains and down the western slopes. Descending toward low-lying coastal areas, the air is compressed and heated-five degrees for every 1,000 ft. of descent. As a result, the Santa Anas often bring 100° temperatures with them-though temperatures in the Great Basin where they started may have been...
Irrational Behavior. Santa Ana-like phenomena are not confined to Southern California. Similar hot, dry wind sweeping down mountain slopes is called "foehn" (pronounced, approximately, fain) in Austria and Germany, "chinook" along the U.S. and Canadian Rockies, "sky sweeper" on Majorca, "khamsin" in Israel, and "the Canterbury northwester" in New Zealand...