Word: swathing
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Apiano stands alone on an empty swath of New Zealand beach while behind it a towering wall of seawaves threatens to obliterate it. That singularly haunting image is at the core of Jane Campion's new film "The Piano." The hoary proverb which states that a picture is worth a thousand words could not be more appropriate. The value of silence, of nonverbal communication, is essential to the theme of Campion's film, which depicts a world in which images and music count as much as words...
...were the Maya, the people who built and later abandoned these majestic pyramids scattered around Central America and who enacted these bizarre rites? The question has piqued scientists across a broad swath of disciplines ever since an American lawyer and explorer named John Lloyd Stephens stumbled across something strange in the Honduran jungle. In Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas and Yucatan (1841), Stephens impressionistically described what was later identified as the ruined Maya city of Copan: "It lay before us like a shattered bark in the midst of the ocean, her masts gone, her name effaced, her crew...
Ever since the go-go '80s gave way to the gone-gone '90s, a certain swath of the press has been itching for a revival of glamorous corporate takeovers. There's no business as sexy as show business, and this summer the wishful murmurs in New York City and Los Angeles have proliferated, become louder, zanier: Bill Gates is buying Whittle Communications, Disney is buying Whittle, Paramount is buying Viacom and its MTV Networks, Ted Turner is buying a movie studio . . . And, of course, Bill Cosby is buying...
...time hydrologists figured this out, it was almost too late. A huge earthen dam had been thrown up along the southern lip of Lake Okeechobee and a great swath of the northern Everglades transformed into prized farmland -- source of most of the U.S.'s cane sugar and 10% of its winter vegetables. To speed development and protect those farmlands from flooding, the Army Corps of Engineers in the 1950s began laying down a system of ditches so vast that astronauts can spot its outlines from space: 1,400 miles of levees, pipes and canals. Today nature's cycle had been...
Such reasoning has particular appeal in the Gaza Strip, where Hamas was born and remains strongest: there 780,000 Palestinians live on a cramped, barren swath of sand where jobs are few and living conditions harsh. Says "Omar," the 30-year-old product of a Gaza slum and now a Hamas activist: "I am a man with no home, no land, and so I have no identity. Islam gives me that identity...