Word: tractor
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Things may be getting a little too exciting out in the field. Two weeks ago, FBI agents thwarted Montana ranchers who were going after a T. rex skeleton with a tractor, presumably to remove it from federal land and sell it on the open market. And the public's hunger for fossils isn't limited to dinosaurs. Wyatt recently brokered the sale, for $2,400, of some bits of fossilized Cro-Magnon man advertised over his fossilnet.com Website--a sale that was condemned by anthropologists...
...with buckets--for nothing. People are desperately scrounging for wild grasses, roots, bark--anything to supplement government rations as low as 12 spoonfuls of grain a day. In one village on the eastern coast, a rice-processing mill has no rice, so it is making noodles from seaweed. Every tractor, truck, wagon and ox-cart has been mobilized to distribute food aid as it comes in. Still, the pain is spreading across this country of 24 million as unremitting hunger stalks the land. Li Han, a Chinese truck driver who crosses the frontier regularly at Guchengli, has watched it. "People...
There's one simple explanation for the triumph of capitalism over Soviet communism: we had Astaire and Marilyn; all they had were boy-loves-tractor pictures. As the battle of the ideologies was fought on movie screens around the world, the edifying drabness of Soviet-bloc films couldn't compete with America's glamorous, sexy, lilting pop culture. As Dana Ranga, director of the terrific documentary East Side Story, puts it, "A specter was haunting communism: the specter of Hollywood...
...only Soviet specialists in musicals were Alexandrov and Ivan Pyriev, the man who made the tractor movies. Pyriev's peasants in Tractor Drivers (1939) sing, "With shellfire thundering and gleaming steel,/ The machines will race ahead to lead the march." In Alexandrov's factory fantasy The Bright Path (1940), workers sing, "Whether you work a machine or break through rocks/ A wonderful dream reveals itself and calls you forward." Naive, yes, but ferociously pertinent for the Russian audience--propaganda in its noblest form...
...Monday that will create a single citizenship for residents of both republics and unify their foreign and economic policies. Faced with a shattered economy that makes Russia's look robust, Lukashenko has pushed for integration with Russia, which in any case supplies Belarus with everything from cheap fuel to tractor parts. For his part, Yeltsin hopes that swallowing up Belarus and extending Russia's borders westward could provide a counterweight to a rapidly encroaching NATO. The new entity will be governed by a bureaucrat-bloated "Supreme Council" featuring the two presidents, their prime ministers, parliament heads and the chairman...