Word: powder
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...keep up, ski makers must constantly improve their wares. Salomon recently launched its SnowBlade, creating a hybrid that captures the thrills of skiing, in-line skating and snowboarding. As Carl Helmetag, CEO of Head USA observes, "Snowboarding opened a whole new image of fun, of carving through powder and trees, and these new skis answer that need in skiing. You can hear people on these skis whoop and holler. It's an incredible thing...
...large number of variables involved, determining whether the mix contributed to a Gulf War Syndrome is still difficult if not impossible. Pentagon officials insist the vaccine, licensed by the FDA since 1970, is safe and effective. With UN inspectors still certain that Saddam Hussein is hiding anthrax powder, the Pentagon believes the benefits of prevention outweigh questions about the cure...
...most illuminating and eloquent is Tobias Wolff's explication of his short story "Powder"--which centers on a father and son's attempts at making their way home for Christmas Eve in the midst of a snowstorm. The urgency of memory, the need to mediate all the past's heart-break and humor, infuses Wolff's story with dead-pan beauty. Reminiscent of Raymond Carver's classic "Popular Mechanics" (minus the bloody conclusion) in terms of its powerful brevity, "Powder" is the best work included in the anthology...
Although "Powder" is three and half pages of genius prose--which is also included in Wolff's most recent book "The Night In Question"--it represents all the stories included this year's collection of "The Best American Short Stories." They may not all necessarily take the art of the short story to much needed, new innovative levels, but they all offering precisely crafted glimpse into the human experience that echo entire worlds and lifetimes...
...story that comes closest to Wolff's stunningly rendered "Powder" is "Transactions" by Jamaican writer Michelle Cliff (No Telephone to Heaven, Abeng). As wonderfully bizarre as it poetic, it tells the story of a traveling salesman hawking American goods and culture ("Witch hazel. Superman. Band-Aids, Zane Grey. Chili Con carne...Camels") on a Caribbean island who buys a poor German girl that he finds on the roadside. Before taking the girl home to his sterile wife, they go to an enchanted spring/hotel/tourist attraction run by a woman with an obsession with Jet magazine...