Word: skies
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Like most kids fortunate enough to grow up outside of the light-polluted and smog-ridden metropolis, I was fascinated by the starry night sky above me. Books about astronauts and rocket ships competed with Muppets and dinosaurs for space on my fledgling bookshelf. Back then a trip to the Hayden Planetarium in New York City was a special treat, and a morning of cartoons would not be complete without the extraterrestrial antics of the Jetsons. I knew the position of each planet relative to the sun in addition to the names of all the early astronauts. The capstone...
...abuzz with tales of sightings for days, and Harvard's armchair astronomers regaled whoever would listen with hyperbole and an occasional fact. Not wanting to miss out on the chance of four millennia, I turned my eyes skyward yet again. The same pea-sized white blob hung in the sky, and it was only after I cleaned my eyeglasses that I was convinced it was indeed a comet and not a piece of lint from the laundry room--piece of lint whose death toll was presently 39. I shared my disappointment with a companion, but her reverence was incorrigible. Others...
...often in religious thinking, the sky figures importantly in the New Apocalypse. For centuries the stars have been where the meditations of religion, science and the occult all converged. Now enter Comet Hale-Bopp. In an otherwise orderly and predictable cosmos, where the movement of stars was charted confidently by Egyptians and Druids, the appearance of a comet, an astronomical oddity, has long been an opportunity for panic. When Halley's comet returned in 1910, an Oklahoma religious sect, the Select Followers, had to be stopped by the police from sacrificing a virgin. In the case of Hale-Bopp...
Never kick a man while he's in rehab. It's a painful lesson learned by the New York Daily News after it erroneously reported that Robert Downey Jr. was at the Mondrian hotel's so-cool-the-staff-is-icy Sky Bar in L.A. Problem I: Downey's on parole and isn't allowed in bars. Problem II: Downey was on set in Savannah, Georgia. Solution: Downey's suing the Daily News...
...Flannery O'Connor--in the fate of people who cannot find a reason for their existence. The husband in Helping who falls off the wagon tries to defend himself by attacking his religious wife: "Sometimes I try to imagine what it's like to believe that the sky is full of care and concern." The remark wounds, as intended, but the speaker and all the sufferers in this remarkable collection know it is a cry of pain...