Word: pit
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Kinsley, a Rhodes scholar and a former Crimson editor, said writing the book, which took him four years and numerous revisions, had been a 'bottomless pit...
...Communism" of the Soviet Union. It depicts a conversation between two birds, one a giant roc that soars over the earth, with "the blue sky on its back," and the other a timid sparrow "scared stiff" in his bush. The world is in chaos ("Gunfire licks the heavens,/ Shells pit the earth"), and the sparrow wants to escape to "a jeweled palace in Elfland's hills." The roc replies angrily...
...custom loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, dangerous to the lungs, and in the black stinking fume thereof, nearest resembling the horrible Stygian smoke of the pit that is bottomless." James's obsessive abhorrence of smoking is more than matched today by members of militant groups who, to protect their lungs and nostrils, seem determined to restrict the consumption of tobacco to consenting adults behind closed doors...
Part of the travel surely is necessary. A President does need to see his nation, does need to confront the world's other authorities eyeball to eyeball. But does he have to turn the White House into a kind of pit stop...
Philips-MCA has taken a different approach. Its aluminum-coated, plastic record, stamped from a master disc that has been etched by a laser beam, is covered with billions of microscopic pits. Variations in pit size encode the video and sound messages. For playback, a sharply focused beam from a low-power (one-thousandth of a watt) helium-neon laser scans the disc as it whirls around at 1,800 r.p.m. The laser beam flickers as it is reflected from the record's pocked surface, and the flickering is detected by a photosensitive cell, like that used in photographic...