Word: mud
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...land at Walden Pond, as well as Thoreau's walking stick, notched in inches so that he could take accurate measure of all he observed during his frequent peregrinations. Also in the museum collections: a doll and teakettle that belonged to Louisa May Alcott, and the wood-soled mud shoes worn by her neighbor Sophia, Hawthorne's wife...
...Birdsong, a brilliant, bleak earlier novel, also to some extent a romance, Faulks wrote of sappers tunneling under trenches in World War I, listening for opposing tunnelers, waiting to be blown up and buried under yards of mud. The new novel is not so bloody, but like Birdsong it evokes vividly the erosion of nerve worked by fear, hunger, illness and the dimming of peaceful life to an unconvincing, half-remembered fantasy...
...under pressure is a rare commodity these days, especially in that debased form of infotainment known as the game show. Yes, the gallop of thundering nerds can be heard on Jeopardy!, but most shows have daters or honeymooners lewdly embarrassing each other. The mud wrestling is only verbal, but it's still a tiny step from Jerry Springer--and a long way from the stellar font of quiz shows, radio's Information, Please (1938-48), hosted by Clifton Fadiman and featuring the mordant wits Fred Allen and Oscar Levant. Back then folks tuned in to meet people cleverer than they...
...Year of Monica was driven forward by outsiders and scandal prospectors of every kind, from the anti-Clinton tycoon Richard Mellon Scaife to the freelance spider Lucianne Goldberg and the Jupiter of sleaze, Larry Flynt. "There's a cottage industry of digging up dirt and slinging mud," says Kyle McSlarrow, chairman of Quayle 2000. "The candidates themselves will bend over backward to stay away from it, but they've lost control...
...pigs, on the other hand, can't be killed fast enough--though 2 million a week are being butchered. And therein lies the problem. Hog farming, until recently the most profitable sector in agriculture, is stuck in the mud. A glut of live pigs on the market, exacerbated by a sudden drop in slaughterhouse capacity, has pushed the price of pigs down to levels not seen since the Depression. "It's a lethal mixture," says Al Tank, CEO of the National Pork Producers Council. Across the South and Midwest, farmers are losing thousands of dollars a day, drifting deeper into...