Word: sand
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...direction of Cairo. When he picked up speed and refused to land, the Israelis said, the Phantoms first fired in front of him, then at his wingtips, and only then at the plane itself. Crippled by their cannon, the 727 made a bad wheels-up landing on the Sinai sand. It hit, bounced and burst into flames. "He did a fairly poor job of it," said one of the Phantom pilots...
Shortly after 8 a.m. last Monday, Gravedigger Jean Taraud inspected a whitewashed concrete tomb in the graveyard on He d'Yeu, a small, windswept island eleven miles off the west coast of France. "I noticed that the sand around it had been neatly swept-too neatly, considering how many visitors there always are on Sunday," said Taraud. "Then I noticed chisel marks on the tombstone. I said to my colleague: The tombstone has been lifted...
...shaped ship was hit no more than once a day even in the most dense part of the belt, which consists mostly of tiny particles, rather than the chunky rocks that peril science-fiction space travelers. None of the impacts were made by fragments larger than a grain of sand, and none did any detectable damage to the thinly shielded $50 million craft. By carefully planning Pioneer's trajectory, controllers kept the ship at least 4,000,000 miles from those larger (at least seven miles in diameter) and rarer asteroids that can be seen by telescope on earth...
...Vonnegut's back-of-the-comic-book approach to serious matters that led to his enormous popularity, especially with young readers. His novels are clear, simple, funny, humane and need hardly any explaining at all. His Dynamic Tension draws the beach bully and the runt who is getting sand kicked in his face toward the same bitter fate. Both will grow old, die and vanish in a universe that is 99.9% indifferent vacuum. There are no immortal souls in Vonnegut, only the soles of the feet which his Bokononists in Cat's Cradle warm by ritually flattening against...
From November until late January, pilots landing at the International Airport near the northern Nigerian city of Kano must worry about a special hazard. Hot winds off the Sahara, known as harmattan, pick up so much dust and sand that the sky becomes hazy and visibility is drastically reduced. Last week a Royal Jordanian Airlines Boeing 707 coming in for a landing at Kano had to make a second attempt because of the blinding harmattan. As the plane landed on the second try, the 707 suddenly burst into flames, and 176 of its 202 passengers were killed. The death toll...