Word: sparking
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...explosion came, appropriately enough, with Achmed the Dead Terrorist, a character Dunham debuted in late 2007 on his DVD Spark of Insanity. Achmed, a bigheaded Halloween skeleton, is a failed suicide bomber. (He had a "premature detonation.") He has not yet come to terms with his demise - he just got a flu shot - and snaps "Silence! I kill you!" at audience members when they laugh, which is pretty much constantly. The Achmed sketch is the fourth most watched online video ever, according to the Web-tracking service Visible Measures; it's been viewed nearly 200 million times, more even than...
...desires. The Faculty tried simultaneously to reclaim the university’s authority over what a college education should mean after the permissive 1960s, and to avoid an entirely regressive return to the “Great Books” curriculum of the early twentieth century. The curricular review sparked ferocious debate at the time. “The number of faculty members in the room for the final vote was so large that we had to move to the science center,” Government professor Jorge I. Dominguez recalled. Debates over the new Gen Ed program, by contrast...
...designed to be able to absorb it and then to be able to get rid of the static electricity," he says. A lightning strike actually hitting an electrical circuit and causing a short circuit is "terribly rare," he says. "But the [term] short circuit was used. Short circuit equals sparks. Spark equals fire. We're speculating, but an airplane has gone missing." It's believed to be the first time a plane has gone down between South America and Europe (or vice versa) since the route was inaugurated in 1947. (See pictures from the Buffalo plane crash...
...Europe's railroad industry, for decades dominated by stodgy state-owned monopolies, is ready for a renaissance of its own. A looming round of deregulation is set to spark an industry restructuring, pitting existing state-owned railroads against smaller private upstarts. At the same time, countries including Spain, Italy and France are spending billions of dollars on new high-speed railroads and rolling stock to compete with airlines. All this means one thing for travelers in Europe contemplating a switch from increasingly stressful and time-consuming air travel to more civilized rail: all aboard. (See pictures of Paris...
...Still, bullish investors see little downside in commodities, although returns may not come overnight. Some consider commodities a hedge against another looming threat: inflation. If loose monetary policies implemented by central banks to stimulate growth eventually spark inflation, commodity prices might escalate rapidly. "If the world economy is going to improve, commodities are going to be the best place to be," asserts Rogers. "If the world economy doesn't improve, commodities are going to be the best place to be." Anyone for a truckload of soybeans...