Word: trek
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...trek through the alien goo of mass media...
...Here we are! Hooray!" Those were modest words for a momentous achievement. They came in a radio message from a six-man team of adventurers and scientists that reached the South Pole last week after a 3,213-km (1,992-mile) trek across Antarctica by dogsled. The expedition was the first to reach the pole by dogsled since Roald Amundsen beat Robert Scott there 78 years ago. But impressive as the feat is, it marks only the midpoint of an even more ambitious journey: a 6,450-km (4,000-mile) campaign that would be the first dogsled trip...
...seven-month, $11 million Trans-Antarctica Expedition was conceived by wilderness lovers Will Steger, 45, a Minnesotan who earlier led a historic dogsled trek to the North Pole, and Jean-Louis Etienne, 43, a French physician. Their purpose was to draw attention to the increasingly endangered continent and to foster the international cooperation that can preserve it. The team, whose other members come from the Soviet Union, China, Japan and Britain, is conducting a variety of studies. Among them: recording ozone levels, air temperatures and wind speeds, and taking samples of snow that will be analyzed for pollutants...
Mostly, however, TV horror is flourishing in a batch of popular syndicated programs, usually tucked away on independent stations. Eight such series are on the market. Three of them -- Star Trek: The Next Generation, Friday the 13th: The Series and War of the Worlds -- were among the five top-rated weekly syndicated shows at the end of last season. Oddly, they have attracted little notice beyond their cult audiences, even from the clean-TV crusaders, who would probably be appalled by the prolific (though rarely graphic) violence. Which is just fine, since it allows the rest of us to enjoy...
Such attractions were rare on mainstream TV in the past. Rod Serling's Twilight Zone served up some chills, but it was less interested in frightening the viewer than in offering moral parables. Star Trek will forever be enshrined in TV's science-fiction pantheon, but it wasn't nearly so scary as the sight of the cast members growing old in the movies that have followed. The 1960s anthology series The Outer Limits represented the outer limit of TV's flirtation with the fantastic, while Kolchak: The Night Stalker was the closest the medium ever got to a good...