Word: thinning
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What remains of the present Soviet government, meanwhile, is dissolving at breakneck speed. Institutions that had seemed both immutable and central to Soviet life are vanishing into thin air or being turned inside out at a dizzying pace. A citizen who returned last week from a fortnight out of the country might think he had awakened from a decades-long Rip van Winkle sleep, so totally had the country changed in his absence...
...Herman's Head, the discord has spread to the main character's subconscious. As a young magazine researcher plows through a typical day, his four inner "selves" -- representing intellect, anxiety, sensitivity and lust -- compete for control. The device generates some laughs but starts wearing thin before the first episode is even finished...
...Grease. Hasselfree's The Edge of the Knife, with a soap-opera setting, gets most of its humor from the audience; participants are asked to guess the murderer's identity and motive. A bit higher up the food chain, Forever Plaid uses the singers' plangent harmonics to camouflage a thin book. And you need a doctorate in Broadway shows and lore to get all the jokes in the new edition of Forbidden Broadway -- but for insiders, and good guessers, the musical malice has its own witty thrill...
...real explosion in electronic services may have to wait until U.S. homes are rewired with hair-thin fiber-optic cables that can carry hundreds of times as much information as old-fashioned copper cable. So far, the fiber-to- home project has been bogged down in Washington politics. The technology exists, but the question is, Who pays? It will cost an estimated $150 billion to $500 billion to rewire America. Regulators have opposed phone-industry attempts to stick ratepayers with the bill. Cable-television companies, meanwhile, are also overlaying their old networks with optical fiber. With fewer restrictions...
Veteran eclipse watchers who caught the show on July 11, 1991, declared it to be one of unsurpassed beauty. But from the standpoint of science, it was something of a letdown. High, thin clouds made a rare appearance above Mauna Kea that morning, interfering with the quality of data gathered through telescopes. "It was a miserable sky in the infrared," complained astronomer Robert MacQueen. Even more damaging to the infrared readings was the fine dust accumulating in the earth's atmosphere since the June explosion of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines. "It's just heartbreaking that after being dormant...