Word: squints
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Astrology has something frowsy about it. It comes to the door in hair curlers. It looks through the screen with squint-shrewd eyes. The caller who rang the doorbell stares in at crackpot mystery in the half-light, and senses + there a kind of disreputable plausibility. The dogs on the porch get restless and slink away. A universe of surreal connections unfolds...
...Mountain resident Robert Redford. Then look closer and find a superhero's face as it might have been drawn by Wallace Wood for a Mad comic- book parody. The jawline, a shade too prominent, entertains the rumor of buffoonery. The smile is one of unwarranted self-assurance. His eye squint seems not to have registered that the world sees him differently: as a preening oaf. With every gesture he is screaming, Help! I'm a clown trapped in a leading man's body...
...while, as the parents, girlfriends and ancient oarsmen stood expectantly on the sidelines, it looked as if Harvard Coach Harry Parker might call the whole thing off. Twice he ventured off the Red Top floating dock, causing nervous spectators to squint into the sun to decipher his inscrutable facial expression. The word passed from one knot of people to the next...
...astronomers and other scientists, the thrill goes far beyond a squint through an eyepiece on a shivery night. Although experts warn that Halley's latest go-round -- or apparition, as they call it -- could be the dimmest of the 30 visits in recorded history, from a scientific standpoint it will be nothing short of the Fourth of July. Next March, as Halley's speeds toward its closest approach to earth, it will be greeted by five diminutive, instrument-crammed space probes, two launched by Japan, two by the Soviet Union and one by the eleven nations of the European Space...
...said John A. Wolter, flinging open the door to the vault, which was cool and quiet as a tomb. "And this," he continued, sliding out a drawer, "is absolutely priceless." The item at hand was a map, faded so much that to take it in entire one had to squint. Drawn in 1791, it was Pierre L'Enfant's original layout of Washington. And here and there on the document, bleached so faint by time that the eye could not make out the words, were criticisms scribbled by the era's most brilliant fussbudget, Thomas Jefferson...