Word: oddness
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Still, a long mythic fiesta between two explosions may not be a bad way to have a life. The first explosion came in Fossalta di Piave in northeastern Italy at midnight on July 8, 1918. A shell from an Austrian trench mortar punctured Hemingway with 200-odd pieces of shrapnel. The wounds validated his manhood, which they had very nearly destroyed. The second explosion came 25 years ago this summer. Early one morning in Ketchum, Idaho, Hemingway (suffering from diabetes, nephritis, alcoholism, severe depression, & hepatitis, hypertension, impotence and paranoid delusions, his memory all but ruined by electroshock treatments) slid...
Viewed from hip Los Angeles, Orange County has sometimes seemed a quaint appendage sprawling southward down the Pacific Coast, a pleasant afterthought with an odd weakness for white shoes and alarmists of the John Birch Society stripe. To the larger world, the county still summons up images of citrus groves and Disneyland, planned communities and the young Richard Nixon, hard- core conservatism and the late John Wayne. But today Orange County is undergoing a dramatic change, exploding with new wealth. Its economic output has more than tripled in a decade, and its population since 1970 has jumped...
...berry crop they usually feed on. Hunters attribute the problem to overpopulation, the result of a shortened spring hunting season. Whatever the cause, scouts at Philmont are stuffing gunnysacks with food and other odorous goodies and hanging them on trees far from the tents. The name for these odd articles? Bear bags, of course...
...payoff is well worth the trouble. The divers have retrieved more than $15 million in silver coins, gold dust, and artifacts; the Whydah's bell alone has been appraised at $5 million. Clifford, who has meticulously studied the manifests and other records of the 50-odd ships plundered by the Whydah's captain before his ship sank, estimates that the loot still in the sand is worth $380 million more. It includes 500,000 to 750,000 silver coins, 10,000 lbs. of gold dust, a casket of "hen's-egg-size East Indian jewels" and some African ivory...
...journey re-created as spectacle, stripped of its pastoral imagery and retooled in terms of media glut. Hey, look! you hear the nasal voice of the artist saying: this is what the banks of the electronic Mississippi look like as they glide by. Here is a succession of odd dreams, bigger than life: a red fingernail the size of a mudguard, a slough of squirming orange spaghetti, a girl whose perfect, impersonal beauty has to advertise something other than herself, the black void of outer space, a paper clip, crinkled silver Mylar and bristling sheaves of fiber-optic cables...