Word: thunderclapping
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Last week, before the state supreme court's thunderclap ruling, it was difficult if not impossible to find a lawmaker on Capitol Hill who expected Gore to survive. "The coffin was on the ground, and the dirt was being poured on top of it," says a top Senate Democratic aide. Publicly the lawmakers still supported the Vice President, albeit in a mechanical and slightly impatient way. Privately they prepared for life with President Bush...
Wrong. Rudy Giuliani's decision to drop out wasn't a huge surprise--the New York City mayor is battling prostate cancer and his wife just hired a fancy divorce lawyer--but it was a personal drama of operatic proportions, a thunderclap so loud that mere politics couldn't account for it. And Hillary Rodham Clinton may find that Giuliani's likely replacement, Long Island Congressman Rick Lazio, is a tougher opponent than Rudy would have been. Lazio is no titan, but he is young, genial, ethnic, Roman Catholic, suburban and unknown to most voters--just like George Pataki...
...Rockefeller and Carnegie built the industrial age, then Morgan (1837-1913) financed it. The most imposing personage ever to bestride Wall Street--his nickname was Jupiter--Morgan had a thunderclap voice, a ferocious glare and a grotesquely disfigured red nose that, he once ruefully joked, had become "part of the American business structure." Where Rockefeller and Carnegie endured hardscrabble boyhoods, Morgan came from a well-to-do Hartford, Conn., family, and his appetite for bosomy women, enormous yachts (his 300-ft. Corsair lent him a piratical image) and exquisite art was legendary...
...terror strikes, it always tears through the comforting screen of normality. One moment, midmorning shoppers and workers bustle along Nairobi's Haile Selassie Avenue at the downtown corner where a bronze eagle and a fluttering flag mark the five-story U.S. embassy. The next, the earth trembles as a thunderclap unleashes a mighty shock wave. Seconds later, black smoke plumes into the sky as the tarmac ignites, flashing fire to parked cars and passing buses. The blast shatters every window within a quarter-mile radius into lethal slivers, blows the bombproof doors off the embassy, sucks out ceilings and furniture...
Only after the roiling whirlwind of notes subsided did the figure at the center of the stage relinquish his grasp of inspiration and allow his arms fall to his sides, giving the final cue of the evening. The audience understood and responded with a thunderclap of applause, adding four standing ovations to his collection...