Word: pattern
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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There has been little apparent pattern to the fires, which have struck at a variety of denominations and at churches with both black and white congregations. A few days after the Gainesville fire, Florida police arrested an ex-convict from Chattanooga, Tenn., on charges of loitering in the area, but say he is only one of many suspects. State and federal investigators believe that while many of the fires are the work of just one or two arsonists, others may be copycat crimes. In that case, Florida churchgoers may have to bed down in the pews for some time...
This year, the familiar pattern has been unwillingly but faithfully followed. The Harvard and Yale teams have fallen far short of preseason hopes or expectations. But, as in the past, both conscious strategy and the insidious but unconscious aura of the the game inexorably combine to save the special play, the hardest tackle, the all-out effort, for today. The explosion that inevitably follows produces exciting football, unexcelled football. It is touched off when two ordinary teams suddenly find their niche in the unpredictable common denominator that is football and become part of a legend...
...Ward, June, Wally and Beaver Cleaver in the house across the street and hear the rush of a tail-finned T-Bird cruising by, with Elvis and Buddy Holly blasting from the radio through tinny pre-Dolby speakers. Many of the streets are laid out in that cookie-cutter pattern of curves and cul-de-sacs familiar from Steven Spielberg movies. You know the scene: a tract-house version of the Norman Rockwell family seated at the breakfast table, dog in the corner waiting breathlessly for some scraps. In the congestion of all these American icons, say hello to Moreno...
...Southern California, split from each other by the mountains east of Santa Barbara, are the notorious yin and yang, Hatfields and McCoys, of California geography and culture. But the state is dividing and subdividing now along a thousand new fault lines of language and identity. Perhaps anticipating a pattern elsewhere in the world (the former Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, possibly fracturing Canada?), the cultures of California seem to fragment into their constituent parts...
Dingman, on the other hand, seems to disagree. Instead of recognizing this fall's "unanticipated pattern" as a matter to be remedied, he places blame on the individual houses...