Word: shockingly
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...knew myself to be ... As they slowly built the igloo up on an ever-decreasing circumference, I watched with a sense of the anti-material oppositeness of the thing ... Without so much as the caesura of a drawn breath I was first shouting in joy, then screaming in shock ... I had discovered in myself the double personality engendered by school: the good attentive boy in class, the raucous, unsprung Dionysian in the schoolyard at recess...
...famous for his almost mandarin courtesy--young Wally was raised in a cocoon of kindness where such selfishness was unthinkable. Only when he was sent away to summer camp did he learn the awful truth about the rest of humanity. He has never recovered from the shock. "The counselors were very rough and occasionally sadistic. Once, when they were annoyed with a boy, they actually suggested that we beat him up! The whole world turned out to be like that camp. I still can't get over it, and writing, for me, is a way of trying to make sense...
...Thousands of bodies were buried in the sludge, their location sometimes marked by pools of blood on the surface. Other corpses lay half visible in miniature bogs that were as treacherous as quicksand. Some exhausted survivors lay on the surface of the mud in shallows, or staggered along in shock on drier ground. Many of the living were naked or only partly clothed; their garments had been torn from them by the swift-moving lahar. All were encrusted with ash-colored goo that quickly hardened under the next morning's sun into a gritty carapace. Many of the survivors...
...melting the ice cap, warns knowledgeable residents to head for safety. More sophisticated techniques include tiltmeters or laser ranging devices to detect deformations in the volcano cone, also caused by magma oozing upward. Seismometers are used to measure harmonic tremor around the volcano, a series of highly rhythmic shock waves associated with the motion of magma inside or beneath the cone. In Hawaii, a harmonic tremor lasting for some four to five minutes nearly always precedes an eruption...
Having never spent an Easter weekend in America, I asked some friends of mine whether Good Friday and Easter Monday are national holidays like President’s Day. They looked at me in shock and then smirked as they politely informed me—knowing about my distrust of most things religious—that I was now living in a “real secular country” where religion plays no part in the state. This is one of America’s more admirable qualities, yet seems to be not quite the whole truth...