Word: thickness
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...temple it is always quiet. No lobbyists or reporters hover about the paneled chambers; tall bronze gates seal off the cool marble passageways from the public. The black-robed Justices emerge onto the high bench only to hear the arguments of deferential lawyers, and then vanish again behind a thick velvet curtain. They deliberate in secret, insulated and remote from the hurly-burly of American politics...
Nature has provided just the right level of ozone for life; if one could squish all of the stuff in the stratosphere, it would amount to a strip of gas about an eighth of an inch thick. The danger is that various man-made gasses may be seeping up into the stratosphere and destroying this delicate balance, causing ozone to be eaten up faster than it is being made...
Both nature and culture have long conspired to excite Quebec's yearning for autonomy. As Canada's largest province, with twice the area of Texas and a gross domestic product double that of New Zealand, Quebec is confident that its thick forests and clear mountain lakes afford it the resources to go it alone. As a pocket of Europe, American-style, graced with both fairy-tale cobbled streets and shiny futuristic shopping malls, the province seems already to belong to a different country from Newfoundland or the Yukon...
Back at home, Conrad is once again engulfed in vegetation grown rank with lack of care. "With my hands," he recalls, "I made a breach in the thick curtain of asparagus ferns that tumbled down from the top of the wardrobe and floated like puffs of smoke between the floor and the ceiling." There, amid the old green plants that recall a painting by Henri Rousseau, he reflects upon the failures of religion and revolt. Fortunately for the writer of these bitter meditations, his current fiction has proved more promising than his past careers...
...state is literally on fire," said Montana's Governor Ted Schwinden, who had only to look out the window of his office in Helena to see thick gray smoke billowing skyward last week from the Gates of the Mountains Wilderness Area, 20 miles from the state capital. Touched off by lightning strikes and whipped by winds that at tunes exceeded 50 m.p.h., flames devoured more than 220,000 acres of unusually dry timber and range lands, creating what is considered the worst conflagration in Montana since 1967. Some 5,000 fire fighters, including many from neighboring states, battled throughout...