Word: sailing
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Long before the invention of the rocket, man dreamed of hoisting sail and traveling through space in wind-blown ships. In The True History, a tale written in the 2nd century A.D. by the satirist and onetime lawyer, Lucian of Samosata, a ship with a 50-man crew is caught in an Atlantic storm, carried aloft and sent, sail billowing, on a journey to the moon. Later storytellers launched ships with sails on even more fanciful space trips. But none of these fictional voyages was as remarkable as the mission now being planned for NASA by scientists at Pasadena...
Outrage rises from the men - and from the prose - and it continually buoys Voyage. Hayden is offended that things as splendid as ships, and the sea they sail on, are polluted by avarice. Yet for a moralist with a case to make, he stays commendably free of melodrama and polemic. It is clear that his seamen need to unite, but the organizers in the book are ineffective, and there is no vacuous optimism; a seafarers' union cannot (and did not) miraculously end greed or brutality...
...lark to go up, up and away in a hot-air balloon. "I ain't worried about getting up," he said. "It's coming down." A contingent of reporters big enough for a moon shot watched Billy soar aloft, narrowly missing a utility pole, and sail over the pine trees of Americus, Ga., with the pilot and a friend. Billy blithely ignored federal recommendations that ballooners use hard hats. Instead, he wore his old Pabst Blue Ribbon cap, which matched the case of refreshments he took along. Back on earth, Billy was somewhat deflated by Georgia officials: they...
...Scientific American, Columnist Martin Gardner, an OuLiPo fan converts the opening two lines of Moby Dick into: "Call me islander. Some yeggs ago-never mind how long precisely-having little or no Mongol in my purulence, and nothing particular to interest me on shortbread, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery partiality of the worriment." Strip Flipper. OuLiPo's only American, Harry Mathews, has contributed "perverbs"-combined proverbs permuted until the mind is dizzied and the meaning transmogrified: "Every cloud is another man's poison"; "The road to Hell is paved with rolling...
...Hamburg to Havana, Cuba, where the passengers understood they could disembark if they chose. Once in Havana harbor, however, the Jews were not allowed off the ship. Their landing permits had been deliberately scrambled by the Cuban government in league with the Nazis, who wanted the ship to sail from port to port searching for asylum. The St. Louis would then become a diplomatic liability, an embarrassment, and would be an active demonstration, according to the Nazis, of what a "problem" the Jews were. This squalid footnote to the Holocaust raises some curious questions-prominent among them is why President...