Word: sheerly
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...scanners around the country in backpacks. By the end of 1997, however, Butler and his colleagues were worried that it was becoming too dangerous. A search by the Iraqis would have revealed that select team members were wired up with special recording and eavesdropping devices. Another problem was the sheer volume of information that was flooding in over these taps. The British, who had been deciphering the tapes, were tired of digging through thousands of hours of Arabic conversations--99% of which was useless...
...rascals that we are, we see right through them. (Up to exam 40. Then our lynx eyes droop, and grading habits relax. Try to get on the bottom of the pile.) Again, it is not that A.E.'s are vicious or ludicrous as such; but in quantity they become sheer madness. Or induce it. "The 20th century has never recovered from the effects of Marx and Freud." (V.G.); "But whether or not this is a good thing or a bad thing is difficult to say." (A.E.) Now one such might be droll enough. But by the dozen? This, the quantitative...
...interim Fox has literally gone back to the drawing board. Darnell and Fox chairman David Hill insist they didn't set out to become the Animation Network, that the confluence of three new cartoon programs is sheer serendipity. Groening has been developing the millennium-timed Futurama for years, and The PJs was signed up months before MacFarlane arrived with Family Guy. But it's also true that The Simpsons, King of the Hill and Darnell's shockumentaries score best with young male viewers, who are much coveted by advertisers but increasingly hard to tear away from their Sony PlayStations...
...from slowdown to full stop. "I know of no sadder story." Any of the black bluesmen Guralnick loves and writes about so well could tell him a dozen before a dropped dime hit the floor. But no bluesman, and few entertainers of any kind, has managed to achieve the sheer dimension of Presley's story. Just as Elvis' girth fascinated fans and the press during his last, misbegotten years, so too it is the outsize scale of Presley's life that makes the story irresistible. Or, at least, unavoidable. The King, dying on the shag-carpeted bathroom floor of Graceland...
...Human Genome Project, was outraged. This wasn't science, he insisted. "Virtually any monkey" could do that work, Watson fumed in the opening salvo of a battle that would rage for months--and which smolders to this day. To patent such abbreviated genetic material, said Watson, was "sheer lunacy" that would entangle genetic research in legal issues and slow it to a crawl. When the battle was over, the NIH had withdrawn the patent proposal and Watson was no longer head of the genome project. Gone too were Venter and his wife and collaborator, Claire Fraser...