Word: parlor
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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When dinosaurs vanished abruptly 65 million years ago, they left an enduring mystery-and created a scientific parlor game. Hypotheses abound to explain the extinction. Brains too small in bodies too large? Emerging mammals feasting on dinosaur eggs? Now comes evidence for another possibility. Geologist Walter Alvarez, probing an ocean canyon near Gubbio, Italy, discovered an abrupt increase in iridium in a limestone layer dating back to the dinosaurs' demise. Probable cause: some mysterious, still unfathomable extraterrestrial event...
...happened then," says Physics Nobel Laureate Luis Alvarez, who gave his son a helping hand. A supernova that could have wiped out the dinosaurs? "A very small probability," says Alvarez père. Also possible but improbable: a cloud of interstellar gas or a large meteorite. On with the parlor game...
...centerpiece of Divine Comedies (1976), James Merrill's last book of poetry, was a 90-page narrative that turned a parlor game into a trip through the first circles of the supernatural. The Book of Ephraim recounted how Merrill and his friend David Jackson used a Ouija board to contact Ephraim, a witty Greek Jew born in A.D. 8; it then followed the two-way conversations that ensued over the next 20 years. This device gave the added ballast of history to Merrill's already established lyric and autobiographical skills; Ephraim's was the spirit...
...cream parlor sitters return to Bailey's, that venerable institution on Brattle St. Closest to an old-fashioned soda fountain, Bailey's sports tables and the most sumptious sundaes in the Square...
Stubbornly independent, Randolph was not swept up in the ideological currents of his time, resisting both Communism and the black nationalism of Jamaican Organizer Marcus Garvey. He kept his own counsel, shunning Harlem's high society and enjoying the company of his wife Lucille, a former beauty parlor operator whose sprightliness contrasted with his own solemnity...