Word: nearings
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...saddest part about Mark McGwire's insistence that he was naturally "given the gift to hit home runs" - even as he copped Jan. 11 to a near decade's worth of steroid use - is that it might just be true. He did, after all, smash the single-season home-run record for rookies with 49 long balls in 1987 - two years before, he says now, he first tried doping. Could he have edged out Sammy Sosa to crush Roger Maris' 37-year-old home-run record in 1998 - knocking 70 balls out of the park - even without juicing? Fans will...
...1980s, for example, the USGS partnered with the state of California to study a particularly unstable stretch of the San Andreas fault near the town of Parkfield. Quakes had been occurring in the area every 20 to 25 years or so. The previous one had been in 1966, so scientists predicted another should hit before 1990. They threaded the region with seismometers and other sensors, then sat back and waited for the telltale signal that would give them notice of the coming rumble. The quake never occurred in the 1980s, nor in the 1990s. It was not until 2004 that...
...vampire-as-vermin gets another workout in this weekend's Daybreakers, an imaginative but wanly executed effort from the German-born twins, Michael and Peter Spierig. They picture a near future in which a plague has turned 90% of the world into vampires. The upside: immortality. Then again, with the vast majority of the population now bloodsuckers, there's a significant shortage of bloodsuckees: the few remaining humans, most of whom are imprisoned and "farmed" in a vast, multi-tiered, Matrix-like abattoir where their blood is systematically drained. Still, it's not enough. As I learn from a fellow...
...That's been the movie norm, from the Bela Lugosi Dracula in 1931 to today's Twilight saga. But there's another view of the tradition, an alterna-vamp, that begins with the first important horror movie, F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu, and was touched on in Kathryn Bigelow's Near Dark and the Francis Coppola Dracula. It's the vampire as pure predator, a gaunt, subhuman pestilence, the ultimate parasite whose host is the rest of us. Nothing sexy about these creatures, or their act of feasting on our blood. They walk and talk like real people, but they...
...With the finish line in sight, Obama has become more engaged in the negotiations, holding near daily consultations with congressional leaders and key interest groups. Says one House leadership aide: "He's talking details, and he's totally aware of everything that has been done to this point ... If he doesn't keep on this on a day-to-day basis, it is going to drift...