Word: skies
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...locate a star involves the checking of various maps against the vault of the sky, with all the related actions: putting on and taking off eyeglasses, turning the flashlight on and off, unfolding and folding the large chart, losing and finding again the reference points...
CALVINO PROVIDES US with no photograph of Mr. Palomar, only a hyper-assemblage of words shifting to reveal observations and insights. If we see faceless Mr. Palomar at all, it is usually by looking through his eyes. We know of Mr. Palomar what we know of the sky-wheeling flock of starlings that he observes...
...zero-sum writer, creating an interconnected world, where for every wording there must be a rewording, though maybe not an equal and opposite one. A word is an event, and, as an event, has repercussions on many levels: if there is a whirlwind of starlings crisscrossing the sky, then there will be a network below of messages along the telephone lines, as Mr. Palomar and his odd friends exchange observations on the birds. Calvino is a great writer because he is a great reader--he reads the world as if it were a book...
...Roger Garland, operations supervisor of the U.S. Customs Air Branch based at Homestead Air Force Base in Florida, once tracked a plane with no one in it for 40 miles until it splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico. "There's a load of unguided missiles in the night sky," he says. "We've been lucky thus far that none of these pilotless planes has crashed into a residential area." Garland's pilots have flown 200 interdiction missions during the past year in what he calls "the best flying outside of combat." And not without hazard. A Florida farmer, arguing...
Federal agents are also checking a link between Thornton and David Lee Williams, 35, of Atlanta, who died with 15 other sky divers two weeks ago when his plane stalled and plunged to the ground in rural Jenkinsburg, Ga. The plane's wing tanks were spiked with sugar, indicating sabotage. Thornton and Williams knew each other, and authorities speculate that they skimmed a cocaine shipment from Colombian drug suppliers. After Thornton's death, Williams became a target for revenge. His fellow sky divers, according to this theory, were just innocent bystanders...