Word: planet
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...transcendently foresighted NASA might admit that the space shuttle's flawless flight last week involved some luck. The luck of the universe (by one new theory) once banged an immense asteroid into the earth, raising a dust cloud so dense that it blocked off the sunlight, ruined the planet's food chain, and thereby brought on the extinction of the dinosaurs-an event that profoundly redirected evolution. It is arguable (at least agnostically for a moment) that life itself-the lightning in the sugar cube, the huge fortuities of weather and climate and chemistry, of amino acids...
Philip Morris does a lot of things well. It sells beer--Miller and Lite are numbers two and three in American sales. It sells Seven-Up, which tops every other lemon-lime soft drink on the planet. It sells thousands of homes a year in Mission Viejo, Calif..and the suburbs of Denver. But most of all. Philip Morris sells cigarettes--Marlboro, Merit, Virginia Slims. Benson and Hedges. Parliament, Alpine, Saratoga 120s and others. Machines in the Richmond facility put tobacco into paper tubes, hand the cigarettes, cut them, insert filters, box them, put the boxes into the cartons...
...rest of the planet is both appalled and puzzled by the spectacle of a superpower so politically stable and internally violent. Countries like Britain and Japan, which have low murder rates and virtual prohibitions on handguns, are astonished by the over-the-counter ease with which Americans can buy firearms...
...only as pop-up figures in a pop-art pageant, Boorman's knights and ladies look just right-like the children of a lost age or planet. Their acting is as green and lush as the rolling hills of Ireland, where the film was shot. Nigel Terry (Arthur) is no Sean Connery, the parfit gentil knight of Robin and Marian, but he passes persuasively from innocence to kingship to the realization that immortality can be won only through a fatal joust with his son and slayer. Cherie Lunghi too closely resembles a Covent Garden flower child to bring Guenevere...
...poetry (Of Sons and Seasons), But his poetry does more than influence his life, it infects his prose. His analogies are vivid. He describes the arms race as "a combination of poker and chess. The movement of fire-breathing, life-annihilating pawns on a global board of a spinning planet." At another point he says, "the news accounts of congressional travel plans rubbed like shards of glass in an oozing wound." His fear of losing his campaign is "a gray moth of doubt that had ballooned into a terrifying pterodactyl whose razored jaws were shredding what remained of my confidence...