Word: used
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...brothers had many happy memories of playing tabletop arcade machines like Frogger and Centipede in their father's garage. Now they wanted to take the new 3-D environment pioneered in the shooting game Doom and use it for something a little more cerebral, something set in the tombs and catacombs of Egypt. The protagonist was to be a little different too. Says Smith: "As soon as you give a male character guns, he becomes a stereotype. We always knew we wanted a female...
...have given the world the Gaggia and the macchiato? Indeed, the Muslim states are the best case in point. Arab power was done in for good when Ferdinand and Isabella demolished the last Moorish stronghold on Iberian soil in 1492. This was no accident, comrades, as the Soviets used to say. It so happens that qahwa came into widespread use throughout the Islamic world in the mid-15th century. Fifty years later, Arab power was finished. And soon after, so was the Ottoman Empire. In 1699, the Turkish advance was stopped once and for all at the gates of Vienna...
Sound ludicrous? That's what her friends said. So Clemmons did some research and conferred with Mory Gharib, an aeronautics engineer at the California Institute of Technology, who surprised everyone by endorsing her concept. According to Gharib, two 6-ft. by 15-ft. kites, used in conjunction with three pulleys, will easily lift the average pyramid stone in a 25-m.p.h. wind. "It needs more study," Gharib says, "but all of the math works." Others were persuaded by what they witnessed. "I thought it was bull," admits Lynn Velazquez, an administrator at Pepperdine University who assists with the field tests...
Nonetheless, Caltech's Gharib is drafting plans to assemble a full-scale, 15-ft.-wide kite for use with a pulley system capable of lifting blocks as heavy as the pyramid stones. The initial tests will take place in California's Mojave Desert--once someone secures the $100,000 required to fund the research. To that end, Clemmons persuaded several companies to collaborate on a new perfume dubbed Ala (Latin for "wing"), which goes on sale in pyramid-shaped bottles in December, with all profits donated to the kite-research project...
...onstage to join in freestyle raps. Such improv energy fuels the new album, and the songs take unexpected twists and turns. Thompson's playing is particularly sharp; he's confident enough to play loose. "One of our fears going in was, 'This is a live album; we can't use studio trickery!'" says Thompson. "But in the end, the songs with mistakes and flaws were the ones that touched us the most, and those are the ones we ended up using." The rough edges give this CD a fresh, honest feel...