Word: verdant
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Trekking in the Arabian Peninsula usually brings to mind images of sweltering deserts, but tucked away in Yemen's remote Haraz Mountains is a cool and verdant high country, only known to a few discerning hikers. At its heart is the 2,960-m peak, Jabal Shibam, pictured, under which sits the 12th century hilltop village of Al Hajjarah - the country's hiking hub. The fortified hamlet is one of the prettiest in Yemen, with numerous trails leading up the volcanic mountains and down to the Grand Canyon-like wadis (dry river valleys). But Al Hajjarah is only accessible...
...some 2,500 years. It was free of commerce and awash in sportsmanship. In other words, it was unlike an Olympic event, ancient or modern. It was, as U.S. silver medalist Adam Nelson called it, "shot put Nirvana," held in the house of Zeus. With the sun rising over verdant hills, crowds streamed into the ancient grounds of Olympia, 200 miles west of Athens, for the shot put competition. With no stands and no scoreboard, the stadium stood as it had in A.D. 393, when it had last hosted the Games. The shot putters paraded on the field beneath...
...Tracking HIV Yunnan is China's fourth largest province and historically one of its most mysterious and remote. (Its picturesque landscape of verdant hills and rustic villages inspired the legend of Shangri-La.) Its distance from the political leaders in Beijing has traditionally made it something of an outlaw province, home to dozens of minority groups and, in centuries past, feudal warlords who ruled with nearly absolute control. Today it is the gateway for heroin traffic that drifts into China from Burma, Vietnam and Laos...
...Europe erupted in war, real life roused Ted from his verdant and productive dreamlife: "I found that I could no longer keep my mind on drawing pictures of Horton the Elephant. I found myself drawing pictures of Lindbergh the Ostrich." Annoyed by the controversial air hero Charles Lindbergh and the blinkered isolationism he was seductively selling to America, Geisel became the editorial cartoonist for PM, the left-wing New York City newspaper. "The New Yorker dismissed us as 'a bunch of young fogies,' " Ted later wrote. "I think we were a bunch of honest but slightly cockeyed crusaders...
...taught them the words of the Gospels, but for millions of children, Hollywood provided the pictures. They were pretty pictures: stained glass in motion, from the First Church of De Mille. Handsome men - their beards neatly curled and trimmed, their robes immaculate - trod on tiptoe through a Judea as verdant and manicured as Forest Lawn. They may have represented Israelites of two millenniums past, but they often looked Nordic; God must have had blue eyes. And they spoke the King's English: King James', with an assist from any screenwriter willing to gussy up his fustian. In these prim tones...