Word: tinder
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Tinder-dry jack pines, white and black spruce, poplar and birch trees exploded in the heat as more than 3 million acres of Canadian timberland went up in smoke during the past two weeks. Some 4,400 fire fighters battled 560 lightning-ignited fires that swept across northern Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Ontario. "The whole north is virtually blowing up on us," sighed Albert Driedger, Manitoba's minister for emergency services. With high winds pushing dense smoke toward Indian reservations, provincial premier Gary Filmon declared a state of emergency...
...transporting a printing press with which they hope to stir change in the convict colony. Talbot reprimands stiffly: "And you, sir, travelling with the avowed intention of making trouble -- of troubling this Antipodean society which is created wholly for its own betterment!" Yet the young Englishman could become dry tinder for Prettiman's incendiary rhetoric: "Imagine our caravan, we, a fire down below here -- sparks of the Absolute -- matching the fire up there -- out there...
...writing about a time when her maternal forebears were losing what little land they had left. Nanapush sees his clansmen tempted out of their holdings with quick-cash offers. He remains an eloquent holdout. "Land is the only thing that lasts life to life," he warns. "Money burns like tinder, flows off like water. And as for government promises, the wind is steadier...
...vegetation were ablaze. According to witnesses, a man and a woman had jumped out of a white car and ignited the city's worst fire in 24 years. In San Diego, 120 miles to the south, some of the canyon brush had grown 12 ft. high and turned tinder-dry in the record heat. It too caught fire, starting the most serious residential blaze in the city's history. Investigators said it was almost certainly a case of arson...
...biggest reporting problem Ungeheuer had was holding back the flow of Pickens' Texas yarns, usually told with full sound effects and gestures. "To Pickens a question was like a match put to tinder," Ungeheuer says. "Asking about a financial arrangement would elicit an anecdote about a nouveau riche Texan and his interior decorator, and then other stories. It was hard to lead the conversation back to the answers I needed." Ungeheuer's dispatches, anecdotes and all, went to Associate Editor John Greenwald, who wrote the cover story with assistance from Reporter-Researchers Lawrence Mondi and Richard Bruns...