Word: training
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Most people know that the composer of Take the "A" Train and Satin Doll and of orchestral suites like Such Sweet Thunder was Duke Ellington. But most people are wrong. The composer, or in many cases the co-composer, of those and dozens of other hallmarks of the Ellington sound was a dapper, diminutive musicians' musician named Billy Strayhorn. From 1938 until his death of cancer in 1967, Strayhorn was Ellington's artistic alter ego--bolstered and publicly praised by the Duke but working always in his shadow, less an employee than a member of his extended household...
WASHINGTON: The last time an incumbent Democrat sat in the White House and Republicans ruled Capitol Hill, Harry Truman won narrow re-election by ravaging a "Do-Nothing Congress" from the porch of his campaign train. That historical lesson may be on the minds of Congressional Republicans this year: After more than a year and a half most remembered for interminable budget disputes and seemingly endless ethics investigations, Congress in the last week has embarked on an impressive flurry of activity. The Senate today passed a major overhaul of welfare by a 78-21 vote, following Thursday's action...
...Melville of the train wreck blamed progress itself. And so, come to think of it, did Melville's possible disciple in this line of thinking, the Unabomber, who was a moral train wreck in his own right. The complaint seems a little simple. It can appeal to a flintstone fundamentalism that argues that materialist secular humanism, with its seductive technological wealth and toys and vices, fosters a godless hubris. But no one except Melville's grandfather thinks Flight 800 fell from the sky because its passengers wanted to travel too fast...
...train wreck a century and a half ago sent Herman Melville into this eloquent rant: "Two infatuate trains ran pell-mell into each other, and climbed and clawed each other's backs; and one locomotive was found fairly shelled, like a chick, inside of a passenger car in the antagonist train; and near a score of noble hearts, a bride and her groom, and an innocent little infant, were all disembarked into the grim hulk of Charon...Yet what's the use of complaining?... Don't the heavens themselves ordain these things...
...concrete cityscape outside the train window transforms into rolling green hills, the people, too, are transformed. The ties come off, the faces relax. People laugh...