Word: nearly
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Since 1981 there have been nearly 20 attempts to circumnavigate the globe in a balloon. Steve Fossett, a Chicago millionaire who attempted the feat five times, plunged into the Coral Sea after traveling 14,236 miles last August. And on Christmas Day he went down again near the coast of Hawaii, taking along his partners, Per Lindstrand of Sweden and Branson. The U.S. Coast Guard fished them out at a cost--to taxpayers--of about $130,000. Setting the elusive record was worth the trouble to Fossett. "I can't tell you how it ranks with the others, like climbing...
...fostered by training in Paris in the 1870s, at the teaching atelier of Emile Carolus-Duran. Very much the maestro and dandy, Carolus-Duran focused his method on a near monomaniac attention to direct tonal painting, almost the opposite of color-based Impressionism. "Velazquez, Velazquez, Velazquez," he intoned, "ceaselessly study Velazquez." And from that study, Sargent got three of the major traits of his style. The first was a consummate skill in rendering objects and people bathed in space and low light. The second was its apparent straightforwardness--its ability to make a gesture count, to "knock in" the folds...
...even though it's yet to happen. We've had our excuses. There was the dubious, theoretical 10,000, reached March 12 by adding individual peak prices for each component to come up with Dow 10,043. Never mind that at no point during the day was the average near that level. Then came the modestly credible intraday benchmark last Tuesday, when the Dow briefly traded at 10,002 based on actual prices before ending the day much lower. On Friday the Dow traded well above the magical mark most of the day, only to sell off again...
Gail Godwin's 10th novel, Evensong (Ballantine; 405 pages; $25), is set in the very near future indeed, specifically the waning weeks of 1999. Millennial fever has reached even the idyllic and remote Smoky Mountain town of High Balsam, N.C. (winter pop. 1,000), where Margaret Bonner, 33, serves as rector of All Saints Episcopal Church. "Winter in the Great Smokies would shortly be upon us," Margaret says at the outset of her tale, "the winter that would see us into the next century and the new millennium. Other things were on their way to us as well, things...
That combination of skill, reputation, experience and unselfishness resulted in a single-season statistical total of near-ridiculous proportions. Mleczko returned from Nagano already holding the career scoring record for Harvard women's hockey players with 143 points in three seasons and, 109 (and counting) later, she has shattered the school single-season and career scoring records previously held by Athletic Director Billy Cleary '56 and Scott Fusco '86 of the Harvard men's hockey team...