Word: pencil
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Then, like a hawk spotting a squirrel, Anderson banks sharply left and dives. Crammed into a cockpit no bigger than half a phone booth, he has the sensation of "riding on the tip of a pencil" when he wrenches the F-16 sideways, almost upside down. The tank appears below him through his canopy ceiling. For a microsecond the world is turned on its back. Anderson is pulling the stick toward him to "lift" the plane horizontally and down. Simultaneously, he eyes a cockpit screen called a heads-up display. The tank, seen distantly through the screen as if through...
Done in black ink and pencil around 1912, the 72-page document has notes and corrections. In one spot Einstein wrote EL=mc 2 (L was a value that turned out to be 1) and then changed it to his famous E=mc 2 (energy equals mass times the speed of light squared...
...consists of cavorting onstage in this year's most original alphabet book, The Z Was Zapped (Houghton Mifflin; $15.95). Chris Van Allsburg's narrative grants each performer an alliterative role: the D was nearly Drowned, the I was nicely Iced, the Y was Yanked away. His mastery of pencil and graphite dust humanizes the characters and lends them an air of drama, as if they were about to receive major parts in the theater of words, paragraphs and books...
Expository writing does not inspire such necessary confidence. I walked in there an innocent with faint dreams of being a writer and I slid out a quivering lump that grew queasy at the sight of a pencil. I wasn't alone in my shame--others in my section and in other sections found their illusions of talent dissolved into thin...
...work. I've sharpened every pencil within a five mile radius. I've shaved, overeaten, cleaned my desk, showered, made tentative plans to someday do my laundry, and called all past and present acquaintances plus a few phoney phone calls because I'm such a cut-up. I am now ready to begin my studies...