Word: outback
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...plausible places for early human settlement of the Americas, Pedra Furada, located in a region of dramatic sandstone cliffs in the arid outback of northeastern Brazil, is probably the most exciting -- and most disputed. When archaeologist Niede Guidon of the School for the Advanced Study of Social Sciences in Paris first excavated the site in 1978, she found cave paintings, ash-filled hearths and what she believes are stone tools that are at least 30,000 and perhaps more than 50,000 years old. Says Guidon: "I was the first person to be surprised. I believed the standard theories." Each...
...from the nearby Manson Crater, 35 km (22 miles) across and about 65 million years old and perhaps made by a chunk of the comet that killed the dinosaurs. Then, after a weekend back in Flagstaff, the Shoemakers departed for their annual one-month field trip in the Australian Outback, where the ancient and stable land surface, peppered with craters of all ages, is a happy hunting ground for geologists...
...event does have its inspiring moments. Steve Dunleavy, the Outback Geraldo Rivera, who cut his journalistic teeth at Rupert Murdoch's sensationalist New York Post and now does checkbook journalism for A Current Affair, regularly turns up in public places, stage-whispering into his cellular phone. Dunleavy actually becomes a cog in the machinery of justice when Smith's attorney, Roy Black, shreds the credibility of Anne Mercer, one of the alleged rape victim's principal witnesses, by accusing her of spicing up her testimony after receiving $40,000 from Dunleavy's show...
Sounds like your standard kidventure picture, doesn't it? But that judgment reckons without the transforming power of animation, which in this case offers a fascinating study in contrasts. The setting is the Australian outback -- vast, empty, rendered in subtle pastels and often seen from radically high or low angles -- where only grownup man, the poacher, is vile. The film's designers speak of Gustave Dore as an inspiration, but their use of geologic mass may also remind viewers of the Creation sequence in Fantasia. And their vision of the eagle recalls Fantasia's prehistoric creatures...
...baby boomers age, their pursuit of rugged outdoor activities like white-water rafting and hiking the high trails is likely to decline. But Park Service officials expect the more accessible locales to increase in popularity as boomers take to their BMWs and Tauruses with a vengeance, clogging the outback roads and sullying woodlands air. "The day is coming when not everybody who wants to get into the parks will be able to," warns Patricia Schifferle, a regional director of the Wilderness Society. "It will be like a sold-out rock concert." If that happens, future campers will be singing...