Word: planetful
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Clark Kent may be a champion of the underdog, but this is one David vs. Goliath story that will never appear in the Daily Planet. Back in 1979, student editors at Chicago's Richard J. Daley College decided to change their campus newspaper's name from the ominous sounding The Obstacle to the more light-hearted Daley Planet, after Superman's favorite newspaper. Funny? Certainly not to DC Comics, a division of Warner Communications Inc., which owns the Superman trademark...
After an unsuccessful attempt to pay the students $1,000 to drop Daley Planet from the masthead, Warner Communications sued, claiming trademark infringement, injury to business reputation and engagement in deceptive practices. "Great Caesar's ghost," the Daley Planet declaimed in consternation. "If we'd known there would be so much trouble, we'd have changed our name to the Gotham Globe, or the Daily Bugle. Then we'd only have to worry about bats and spiders knocking at our office, and not the Man of Steel...
...night, I got a call from someone who wanted to know if I knew anything about the planet Saturn," recalls Sara Chalfen, one of a handful of "casuals"-men and women who work part time to augment the regular staff of 12 operators. "He wanted to know the names of the stars that circle around Saturn. I tried to find him someone at the Smithsonian who would know-I don't know how successful...
...continue to drift, eventually creating a world that will be far different from today's. Africa, Eurasia, Australia and North America will come together to form a giant continent with new climates and ecosystems; South America will become a huge island. Once man has succeeded in overpopulating the planet and exhausting its resources, as he now seems bent on doing, he will have assured not only his own extinction but that of the species that depend upon him for existence: domestic cattle, for example. Man's departure, concludes Dixon, will allow "evolution to get back to work filling...
Although no one spells it out, this "new emotion" sounds like the tactile knowledge of what being alive now, thanks to science and space probes, means: sitting on a crowded planet that is moving very fast. In such a situation, Mooney's narrative suggests, everything that happens matters to everyone. But who can absorb, much less report, everything? The author sometimes reaches for cosmic consciousness and produces more comedy than insights: "On one of the fishing boats in the cove, a young down-islander discovered he had the wrong-size replacement batteries for his transistor and flung them angrily...