Word: pearlies
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...various architectural elements strewn about the dressing-room, the missing coats of paint--they're immaterial. Giasone already has a brilliant set: the violins, gut-strung and armed with baroque bows. The theorbos, or chitarrones, their halved-pear bodies flowering into tall, lyrical stalks. The melancholy viola da gamba and the haunting lirone shaped like early venuses. The blockflutes, the recorders with their warm and woody sound. The tiny baroque guitar, cradled like a courageous lap-dog, and the harpsichords, the harpsichords: banquet tables of the basso-continuo; two banks of oars pulling across the river...
...saying that nary another fruit is ever seen in a dining hall. Why just last week canned pineapple made a cameo appearance on the salad bar, and every so often a pear turns up incognito in the apple...
...sign over the office copier is the kind of Dilbertesque humor one might see anywhere in cubicle land. But in a warren of basement rooms under Princeton University's engineering quad, the meaning is more, well, meaningful. The Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) laboratory, after all, explores how the human mind affects machines. Anomalies is the key word: something different, abnormal, peculiar or not easily classified. In this case, they are the elusive powers of consciousness. Can the emanations of the brain really make the copier malfunction? Or maybe turn on the lights or even cause airplanes to fall from...
...knows all about "the big lie"--the promise that prosecutors make to relatives of murder victims that "everything will be O.K." once a murderer is caught, tried, convicted, sentenced to death and executed. In 1980 her daughter Catherine, 19, and a male friend were stabbed to death on a pear farm near Sacramento, Calif. Virtually disabled by what she called a kind of temporary insanity, Gayle attended the sentencing of Douglas Mickey as he received the death penalty for the killings. She left the proceedings "horrified" that such a sentence could be imposed so matter-of-factly. Yet when Mickey...
...crudely, a lute looks some-thing like a small, pregnant guitar. It is has a body like a pear split in half made of between nine and 50 hardwood ribs. Its short, broad neck is fretted like a guitar but ends in a long and sharply angled pegbox. It is difficult to say exactly how many strings a lute has. The strings are divided into "courses," which are either a pair of strings played together or a single string, and different kinds of lutes from different periods had different numbers of courses. This is one of the most interesting things...