Word: planetful
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What keeps Al Gore up at night? A few months ago, the Vice President was literally jolted awake at 3 a.m. by the idea of a continuous, live Internet image of this planet, an all-earth-all-the-time website. Within weeks, NASA was scrambling to put up the satellites to make his dream come true. Last July 4 he skipped the fireworks so he could stare for five hours into his office computer as it downloaded Pathfinder's first images from the surface of Mars. Another Gore brainchild--he calls it "digital earth"--would allow students with computers...
...code name (Operation Gamma) that lovers and business executives are wont to employ. The result, the largest industrial marriage in history, takes what had been the world's No. 6 car company, Chrysler, and stuffs it into the trunk of erstwhile No. 15 Daimler-Benz, to produce the planet's fifth biggest automobile concern. The new combine, valued at $40 billion, will generate $130 billion in sales and employ more than 400,000 people...
...sick of that Leo DiCaprio. Bad enough he's on the cover of every teen magazine on the planet. Now he's invaded my home page--and my home. Ever since Titanic set sail, "DiCaprio" has been the most searched-for word on Pathfinder, Time Inc.'s website, relegating the Coke and Pepsi of the search-word business--"sex" and "Bill Gates"--to also-rans. Leo searches are especially frenzied from 4 p.m. to 8 p.m. Schoolgirls coming home, I figure, as the sweet spot of the time zone rolls west...
Anne Tyler is one of the few contemporary authors whose work consistently attracts both critical acclaim and scads of paying readers. Those curious about how this trick is performed--a category that must include nearly every other writer on earth--would do well to consult A Patchwork Planet (Knopf; 288 pages; $24), Tyler's 14th novel. This new book not only conforms to the familiar pattern the author has established in her fiction but does so in a fresh and engaging fashion...
Which is never, it must be added, seriously in doubt. The plot of A Patchwork Planet provides little suspense but--Tyler's trademark--many occasions for touching human details. The best of them involve Barnaby's sympathetic observations about the aging people who depend on his services. "I never counted my clients as friends--not even the ones I liked," he says. "Clients could up and die on you." So they do, and Barnaby mourns them. One of his favorites, Mrs. Alford, goes suddenly, and relatives show Barnaby the quilt with a Planet Earth design that she had hastily finished...