Word: thunderbolting
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...Arthur D. Little, Inc. has been trying for five years to hook up with significant amounts of atmospheric electricity. At first he tried flying tethered balloons into the base of thunderheads. Nothing much happened. A tiny spark jumped from the end of the mooring wire, but never a thunderbolt followed, not even when lightning was flashing all around. Apparently the wire drew ions out of the nearby parts of the cloud, thus insulating itself from full-scale lightning...
...personal tank crew as driver during World War II. If or whenever (I pray never) the Russians attack the general's sector in Germany, you can bet he will be in on the counterattack but from the turret of his tank, which I presume he has named "Thunderbolt," with clouds painted on the sides and streaks of lightning in the clouds. Those of us who served with and under him knew long ago that he would be recognized in the very near future as one of the greatest on tank warfare...
...Guatemala, where philandering approaches the status of a national sport, the present chief of state, President Miguel Ydígoras Fuentes, 65, is a defiant monogamist of 38 years' standing. Last week, after long tolerating the irailties of his colleagues, the marital maverick finally shot off a thunderbolt to the Ministry of Interior. "Public rumors supported by evidence," he wrote, "show that many functionaries and government officials not only have mistresses but are seen in public with them, displaying disrespect toward their homes.'' The snapper to President Ydígoras' attempt to achieve fidelity by fiat...
...exits are either barricaded or booby-trapped. A rumor of gas causes mass hysteria. A simple cough is like a thunderbolt that brings on a rain of German grenades. A classical pianist plays a melancholy tune on his sweet-potato pipe and quotes Dante's Inferno as his mind ebbs away "in the lake's foul bottom, plunged in dung"-a grim elegy that unites all their fates. A sentient lover (Tadeusz Janczar) pretends "we're walking in a dark and fragrant wood," but his blonde, tough-minded mistress (Teresa Izewska) shatters the illusion tersely...
That an amateur orchestra should tackle Mahler would seem to swell ambition into hybris evoke awe but wreak disaster. And for it to invite so great an artist as Maureen Forrester would seem to make conceivable only nemesis or utter triumph. But the gods were sleepy Friday night; the thunderbolt never came. Neither catastrophe nor undreamed success came to the HRO: feeling flickered in the music now and again, sometimes brilliantly, but never consistently...