Word: quicksands
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...avoid this distinction, the team must win four of its next 15 games. A reasonable goal, but first the Crimson must extract itself from the quicksand that is its 11-game losing streak...
...parents free. Fresh-faced "counselors," dressed in colorful sport pants and shirts, guide youngsters to appropriate play areas for differing age groups. Three-year-olds and younger can learn spatial concepts -- in and out, over and around -- by crawling in a padded plastic turtle shell or sinking into a quicksand of colorful balls and learning to control the multicolored plastic objects. Kids ages 4 to 6 climb a padded "Swiss-cheese mountain" or creep through a maze of blue, fuchsia and yellow tunnels. Youngsters up to 12 balance on a rope walk or on a webbed "bean field," a bouncy...
Even France's famous "civilizing mission" to the rest of the world has come under question. French policy toward the Arab countries, supposedly an example of Paris' understanding approach to Third World aspirations, sank practically without a trace in the quicksand of the gulf crisis. Says Gilles Martinet, an ex-ambassador with close links to the Socialists: "For most of our statesmen, whether they belonged to the left or the right, France was always strong, feared, respected, admired and envied -- until the gulf war taught us otherwise...
...want another Vietnam, everyone says, squinting into the desert sun. We want something swift and decisive, short and sweet -- a Panama perhaps. For these are the two poles of our collective military memory: on the one hand, the quicksand of Vietnam; on the other, the "brilliant success" of Panama, ; or so it was heralded at the time -- a military action so flawless, so perfectly executed that, as one of the generals responsible for carrying out the invasion boasted shortly afterward, "There were no lessons learned...
...bravado consists in allowing chance to work its will on him, at first believes he will enjoy feeling stranger in a strange land. North Africa, he thinks, will offer escape into adventure, exotic peril, the seductions of oblivion. He is wrong. The desert demands his surrender. The sand is quicksand; it will swallow him whole...