Word: patch
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Gordon Walker, a screenwriter and sometime actor, has hit a bad patch of life. True, his summer appearance in Seattle in the title role of King Lear was modestly successful and personally satisfying. But during the run, his wife of some 20 years left him; his two sons are far away and growing increasingly remote; and he is back in Hollywood pursuing some familiar bad habits: "For the past few weeks, he had been getting by on alcohol and a ten- gram stash of cocaine and he had begun to feel as though he might die quite soon...
ENIAC was the technological wonder of its day. Programming the machine could take as long as two days as "coders" armed with detailed instructions fanned out among the panels, setting dials and plugging in patch cords in an arrangement that resembled an old-fashioned telephone switchboard. Data were fed into ENIAC in the form of IBM punch cards; a million cards were required for the monster's first assignment, a top-secret numerical simulation for the still untested hydrogen bomb. Every time a tube burned out, which happened twice a day at the start, a technician had to rummage among...
...structures with no minds of their own--not animals or people but seedpods, spores, pollen, sprouts, twigs, pupae, the embryonic scribblings of cellular life learning to write its name. One painting, Insecta, 1985, is full of chrysalises, cockchafers and stag beetles, with a red cicada clinging to a scrubby patch of blue ground. Another, Pitch Lake, 1985, has an array of spore clusters creeping, with phallic intent, across a sticky-looking field of bitumen. Some of the images are quite recognizable (there are clams, for instance, and bean sprouts), while others have the sketchy look of genetic diagrams...
Mexico's woes have distracted U.S. attention from its own patch of despair in Oklahoma and Texas, said Thurow. Falling crude prices have not only devastated many oilmen there but also their suppliers and much of the real estate industry. Says Thurow: "When the oil industry goes down, the whole infrastructure starts to fall in value." The evidence is abundant. The accounting firm of Price Waterhouse reported last week that the number of Houston businesses declaring bankruptcy rose 33% last year...
...money-losing oil-shale plant in Colorado. While several big oil companies, including Exxon, Chevron and Mobil, showed earnings gains in the past quarter, most petroleum experts see a lean future. Says Constantine Fliakos, who follows the industry for Merrill Lynch: "The last good news in the oil patch was the fourth-quarter results. We'll have to wait quite a while to hear anything like...