Word: nearly
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...hours later, he found himself facedown in a muddy field somewhere near the Austrian border--but how near? Soldiers marched by, dogs barked, flares lit the night. Then a voice cried out, in Hungarian, the words paralyzing him with fear: "Who is there?" Even 40 years later, as he laughs at the memory, his eyes harden; he shifts his neck under his collar. Had the smuggler betrayed him? "We thought, 'Shit, this is it.'" The man shouted again. Now at the limits of his courage, the boy finally answered: "Where are we?" "Austria," came the reply. The relief poured cool...
...device was an electrical "switch" called a transistor, essentially a tiny electrical gate that controlled the flow of electrons that computers needed to do their math. Yet wrangling infinitesimally small electrons into place demanded phenomenally pure chemical surfaces. In the 1950s and '60s this was an act of near alchemy, certainly beyond the capabilities of most scientists. What the world needed was a reliable base for these circuits. What would...
Fast-forward to 1997, when the ski industry, not to mention the junk-bond industry, has come full circle. Gillett the Bankrupt has had "little" difficulty raising $162.5 million in investment capital, and he is assembling another empire, this one built around medium-size properties near big cities to capture the day trippers and weekenders who account for nearly half the ski business. He bought back his old meatpacking operation in 1994 and added adornments such as a barge business in the Pacific Northwest and a group of golf courses in Montana. Have the bankers lost their marbles again...
...response to this, the man trained for 18 years in dialectics has been canny. More than a decade ago, he reminds me, he said that "if I die in the near future, and the Tibetan people want another reincarnation, a 15th Dalai Lama, while we are still outside Tibet, my reincarnation will definitely appear outside Tibet. Because"--the logic, as ever, is rock solid--"the very purpose of the incarnation is to fulfill the work that has been started by the previous life." So, he goes on, "the reincarnation of the 14th Dalai Lama, logically, will not be a reincarnation...
...Baby counter at Toys "R" Us? The enthusiasm for dressing as Christmas trees brought back painful memories of the Alzheimer's facility where my father spent his final days in a perpetual countdown to the holiday du jour. THE NEXT HOLIDAY IS ARBOR DAY (or whatever), a giant poster near the nursing station announced, AND IT'S ONLY 15 DAYS AWAY...