Word: possessed
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Quite possibly the earth's most ancient life-forms, bacteria are experts at the game of survival. Throw a bunch of them onto an ice floe or into the steaming heart of Old Faithful, and one or another of the unicellular beasties will probably turn out to possess a critical trait that enables it to live through the ordeal and pass that trait on to trillions of descendants, a rapid example of evolution through natural selection. Just as predation by lions has gradually increased the swiftness of gazelles, the use of antibiotics has spurred the emergence of bacteria that...
Morrissey used to possess the singular ability to make his obsessive self-pity entertaining. He moaned so pathetically and bemoaned his loveless fate with such vicious, sarcastic glee, that even the most navel-gazing songs retained a sense of humor. Since his split with the inspired Smiths guitarist Johnny Marr, he's relied more and more on this lyrical inventiveness...
Attacking Iraq could also be messy. Bush would prefer to use unmanned Tomahawk cruise missiles. But he would probably have to send in aircraft as well, and U.S. pilots could be killed or taken prisoner. Saddam could retaliate with the several hundred Scuds he is believed to possess, attacking Israel in the hope that it would strike back and thus strain Washington's ties to Arab allies like Egypt and Saudi Arabia...
...avant-garde as it developed after the 1913 Armory Show, which he had helped organize: roadkill, as it were, on art history's Route 66. He didn't quite have the empirical genius of the older Winslow Homer, to whom his early work strongly relates; nor did he quite possess the visionary force of Marsden Hartley, with whom he shared a love of romantic, elemental images -- sea, rock, the buffeting air of Maine...
...trade with a bare-bottomed customer, said to be Fisher and a john, the competing Hard Copy aired a smidgen of the scene half an hour sooner, allegedly swiping it off a satellite feed. This prompted a lively melee over journalistic ethics in two corners not normally thought to possess many...