Word: swathes
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Since Excalibur cut its swath through box offices this spring, every movie producer with high ideals and $10 million has come up with the same surefire formula: make a hit from a myth. At superficial glance, Clash of the Titans would qualify as the cycle's first ripoff, and a pallid one at that. It proceeds at a pace that must seem stately to tots reared on TV cartoons and the current batch of Saturday matinee-type features. It rarely ascends into exhilaration or slumps into camp. The direction of some actors is pedestrian, if not oafish...
...AWACS radar is a breakthrough as well, according to experts. All ground-based radar suffers a serious blind spot: if enemy planes fly low enough, they escape detection. Any craft flying within the Sentry's electronic swath, however, is spotted within moments of its takeoff, and AWACS will not (as does most other airborne radar) confuse trees and houses with aircraft. From each Sentry the positions of scores of planes and ships-enemy and ally alike-can be tracked automatically, and this information can be interpreted by a crew of 14 specialists. The Saudis' Sentries would be even...
Geyser Dousers & Sign Reversers. Literary and artistic work is just a part of the swath of destruction left by carefree vacationers. They tear out bathroom fixtures and pull up flowering plants. They use blasting powder to collect specimens of Indian hieroglyphics. They feed chocolate-covered laxatives to bear cubs and dump detergent into geysers. Sometimes they block up geysers with rocks and logs. They reverse signs on trails-a form of humor that has led to at least one near fatality. In Gettysburg they love to push over monuments...
...though the Soviet Union were too sprawling for its own good, too diverse to take care of itself without hurting itself, or as though none of those gods or prophets in whom its people believe?particularly Marx?had intended for so heterogeneous and far-flung a swath of humanity and real estate...
Crops within three miles of the crater were destroyed. Downwind, in a triangular swath stretching 200 miles to the east, about 10% of the crops suffered some damage from the dust. Several fields of alfalfa and wheat in eastern Washington were flattened by the weight of ash. When wetted by rains, like those that fell four days after the blast, ash on the ground forms a thick cement-like glop that young shoots may be unable to break through...