Word: sun
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...sun is relentless. The rice paddies, which need at least a foot of water, have less than one or two inches. The corn, which should be as tall as I am at this time of year, is barely half my height. Prospects for both the rice and the corn harvests are bleak. Everything is parched, and with each rainless day, water is vanishing with cruel rapidity. One evening I was at a huge lake, the Sohung reservoir, in the country's breadbasket. To be accurate, I was at what was once a huge lake. It is 96% gone, simply evaporated...
...holiday for deskbound, no-collar workers. Not only does it offer the usual American pastimes--fast cars, parades, costume balls, picnics and all-night music--but it also provides the more contemporary attractions of survival camping, neon lights, nudity, performance art and staged extravaganzas. It's got the sun-dried culture of postmodern road warriors: deep ritual without religion, community without commitment, art without history, technology without boundaries. As essayist Bruce Sterling writes in the only book about the event, Burning Man (HardWired; 1997), which I and others at Wired magazine had a hand in producing, "It's just...
Thus Evelyn Anderson, 82, a resident of the mammoth Sun City retirement community outside Phoenix, paid an astonishing $10,562 last year to a repairman who fixed some sprinklers and, while at it, wangled a loan with a phony sob story. "I felt sorry for him, going through a divorce and all that," says Anderson...
Dorothea Coleman, 90, also of Sun City, trusted, among other scammers, a man from Las Vegas who represented himself as a minister and talked her into giving him $36,000 for an apparently nonexistent children's home. "I was stupid," she says. But then, like many elderly women, she had never learned how to handle money. In her younger days, wives left all financial decisions to their husbands. Her spouse, a lawyer who died in 1988, "would have known better," says Coleman. "He always warned me, 'Somebody will try to get your money.' And they...
Peddlers of phony investment schemes often troll for prospects by visiting churches, country clubs or senior-citizen centers, says Tallahassee, Fla., comptroller Robert Milligan. (Not only in Florida, either. The Olive Branch Center in Sun City has had to institute tight screening provisions to keep con artists out of its weekly meetings.) The scammers often perform a legitimate service, such as income-tax preparation, to win the confidence of an elderly customer before pitching a fraudulent investment...