Word: mushroomer
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...books, movies (including a forthcoming John Travolta film) and a recent series of scary, attention-getting commercials by attention-needing presidential candidate Richard Lugar. Of course, the appeal of nuclear weapons to terrorists is obvious: if destabilizing society or drawing attention to one's cause is the goal, a mushroom cloud outranks truck bombs and sarin attacks...
This solution is quite silly. Why should Hanukkah suddenly mushroom in importance just because it often falls in the same month as Christmas? If Jews, in this case, are simply expressing their religious tradition, then why isn't there a legacy of blue and white wrapping paper dating back to the middle ages? Something highly imitative is going on here...
...Skeleton Key: A Dictionary for Deadheads, describes the fans' playful ardor as "a religion without beliefs." That sounds about right. For most Deadheads, a concert was a church they attended not so much for the gospel as for the communion and community, the hymns and the incense. A giant mushroom cloud of hallucinogenics would lay over the crowd like a fuzzy blanket...
...That kind of fighting still occurs: in the Balkans, in Rwanda and Burundi, in the streets of Los Angeles and Karachi. But the imagination of the world pays little heed to the sensibilities of such conflicts. Minds have been polarized by the cold war and fascinated by the mighty mushroom clouds of 1945--by the imminence of endless death from the radiance of a thousand suns. Nevertheless, in the shadow of that terrifying splendor lurks a history of immense human hatreds, parables we ignore at our peril. The war in Asia was waged mercilessly on all sides. U.S. Major General...
...lessons on aging. Says John Horn, professor of gerontology at the University of Southern California: ``It's the equivalent of the old folks sitting around the village square.'' Though seniors are far from being the dominant group among computer users, their numbers are growing and are bound to mushroom as the baby boomers age. When that happens, they will feel right at home alongside the mass of younger users in the digital future...