Word: patterns
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...madman's repeated clashes with authority fit a maddeningly familiar pattern: since arriving in the U.S. from Cuba as part of the Mariel boatlift in 1980, Jorge Delgado had been arrested at least eleven times for petty crimes and hospitalized as a mental patient seven times. Once he had smashed a chalice during a service at St. Patrick's Cathedral. Twice in the past six months, city psychiatrists had examined him and failed to discover any reason not to return him to the streets...
...early display of congressional muscle, both houses quickly passed a five-year, $20 billion clean-water act that Reagan had vetoed the previous session. When the President sent the bill back again, Congress easily overrode his veto. The pattern for the final two years of the lame-duck President's term was set: in almost contemptuous defiance of vetoes and threats, Congress enacted expensive measures to improve highways and mass transit, mandate 60- day notification of plant closings and layoffs, provide help to the homeless, bolster elementary and secondary education, and provide protection against catastrophic illness...
...each year, a white professor would leave for a year to be replaced by a Black professor. And after all the dust had settled, who would be back teaching at Harvard as a tenured scholar? The white professor. One would not have to be a cynic to recognize the pattern and draw a rather depressing conclusion...
...some observers see an emerging pattern: the virus writers tend to be men in their late teens or early 20s who have spent an inordinate portion of their youth bathed in the glow of a computer screen. Scientific American Columnist A.K. Dewdney, who published the first article on computer viruses, describes what he calls a "nerd syndrome" common among students of science and technology. Says Dewdney: "They live in a very protected world, both socially and emotionally. They leave school and carry with them their prankish bent...
...might consider throwing her a life preserver -- and by the way she surges ahead at odd moments during her races by taking several consecutive strokes without breathing, then hits the finish line after six or eight strokes in no-breath hyperdrive. "I don't really have a breathing pattern," this pool hustler apologizes, sandbagging with the smallest of grins...