Word: solarity
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...androgynous like Michael Jackson, but neither is he aggressively masculine like Tom Jones. He is instead the elegant male, well dressed and sophisticated, but with a boyish, ingratiating smile, so dazzlingly toothy that, for safety's sake, it almost has to be viewed through smoked glass, like a solar eclipse. To keep the tan that has given his skin the color of a tobacco leaf, he has artfully arranged his schedule so that he is almost always in that half of the globe that is celebrating summer. When his 33-city U.S. tour ends Sept. 29, about the time...
There is not an editor in the solar system who would doubt that Tom Wolfe, 53, has very good stuff when it comes to writing slam-bang journalism. But Wolfe's newest project, a novel titled The Bonfire of the Vanities, is another story. Or is it? Rolling Stone magazine has signed him, for a $250,000-plus paycheck, to write Vanities in 27 cliffhanging installments, in the venerable tradition of Dickens, Zola and Dostoyevsky. The real cliffhanger is how long Wolfe can keep tapping the muse without missing an issue. "Two-week deadlines are very rough," admits...
...short essays on art and politics for the newspaper La Estrella de Panamá; conducts a long-distance collaboration with Gabriel Garcia Márquez on a cycle of songs based on some of the Nobel prizewinner's early stories; and, with his pistol-hot band, Sets del Solar (Six from the Tenement), has been galvanizing a concert tour that has ricocheted from Berkeley, Calif., to the Cannes Film Festival and home to New York City. He can also be heard on the sound track of Beat Street, the just opened break-dancing movie, doing nicely by a lollipop...
...North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), which is responsible for providing early warning against aerial attacks, estimates that some 3,800 pieces of junk are currently circling the earth.* Total weight of this space-age garbage: six tons. Two-thirds of the nuts, bolts, oxygen cylinders, broken solar panels, dead satellites, spent rocket boosters and other litter is in geosynchronous orbit 22,300 miles from the earth's surface, where it will remain indefinitely. One-third of the circling scrap is in low earth orbit, only 120 to 300 miles overhead...
...meteorites. Astronauts have dumped sewage, food containers and spent oxygen cylinders overboard. On rare occasions, space walkers have accidentally dropped objects in space. Astronaut Ed White lost a shiny white glove during the Gemini 4 flight in 1965. George ("Pinky") Nelson fumbled away two tiny screws while repairing the Solar Maximum Mission satellite during the shuttle flight last month...