Word: northwester
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Then came the wind, great gusty blasts out of the Northwest. It lifted the dust from the parched fields and swirled it across the land. It tore the powdery soil from the roots of the wheat and deposited it like snowdrifts miles away. Concrete highways were buried under six inches of dust. The rich fertility of a million farms took to the air: 300,000,000 tons of soil billowing through the sky. Housewives in Des Moines could write their names in grime upon their table tops. Aviators had to climb 15,000 ft. to get above the pall...
...England woods the fiddlehead ferns were unfolding, and blankets of wisteria spread over the houses. Outside Santa Fe, ribbons of green laced the brown adobe on the flatlands, and here and there the full-flowering lilacs formed purple buttons. On riverbanks of the Northwest, wild rhododendrons, spiraling up to 30 feet, were spreading red and pink and white blooms two hands wide. Spring was full blown, and the nation's prevailing mood seemed to be as bright as its blossoms...
Auctions are strange activities anyway. Sotheby's invented them in 1744 when a bookseller named Samuel Baker wanted to live better. Since then they have grown into wonderfully weird hybrids of culture and capitalism. In movies like North by Northwest and the Marx Brothers' The Cocoanuts, where Chico bids against himself, they are accurately portrayed as miniworlds of crookedness and anarchy. Brawlers compete in cool frenzies of acquisitiveness...
...prime suspect is something known as the Pacific decadal oscillation. Since 1977, say researchers from the University of Washington, it has been locked into a mode that has made winters in the Pacific Northwest warm and dry, just as El Nino tends to do. But according to climatologist Nathan Mantua, the Pacific oscillation was in a different phase between 1947 and 1976, and as a result winters in Washington State were cold and rainy...
Nagano, though only 120 miles northwest of Tokyo, has long been the provincial capital farthest in time from the center of Japan since unlike the cities on the outlying islands of Hokkaido and Okinawa, it has never had an airport. Even now, with a million Olympic visitors expected, the nearest airport to the Main Press Center consists of a modest, two-story box appointed with exactly four check-in counters and one baggage carousel, 75 min. away by (very occasional) bus. As your plane takes off from Matsumoto, the technicians all line up on the tarmac to wave goodbye...