Word: weirdness
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...Even the players are weird. Take Carl Everett, for instance. Everett, the former Mets outfielder who is the most prominent non-Hispanic black guy in the whole city of Boston, does not believe in dinosaurs. “The Bible never says anything about dinosaurs,” Everett famously told Sports Illustrated. “You can’t say there were dinosaurs when you never saw them. Someone actually saw Adam and Eve. No one ever saw a Tyrannosaurus rex.” Everett was run out of New York in 1997 when he was charged with...
...both teams knew something very weird was happening. The cosmic expansion should have been slowing down a lot or a little, depending on whether it contained a lot of matter or a little--an effect that should have shown up as distant supernovas, looking brighter than you would expect compared with closer ones. But, in fact, they were dimmer--as if the expansion was speeding up. "I kept running the numbers through the computer," recalls Adam Riess, a Space Telescope Science Institute astronomer analyzing the data from Schmidt's group, "and the answers made no sense. I was sure there...
...That neatly eliminated the idea of dust, since a more distant star should have been even more dust-dimmed than nearer ones. But the level of brightness also signaled that this supernova was shining when the expansion of the cosmos was still slowing down. "Usually," says Riess, "we see weird things and try to make our models of the universe fit. This time we put up a hoop for the observations to jump through in advance, and they did--which makes it a lot more convincing...
Blair's cool charisma, however, does still resonate. He has mastered all the weird demands of modern electioneering, from small talk with nervous students to command of arcane detail under TV cross-examination. Blair likes his job, though it has clearly aged him. Unlike his friend Bill Clinton, "he never shouts at people; he's a motivator for his staff--even in a crisis he cracks jokes," says an adviser. He goes to movies, plays tough tennis, loves The Simpsons. He can even be seen pushing baby Leo's pram by himself in St. James's Park on a Sunday...
...showed the death house rooms and the leather gurney on which McVeigh would lie, to go to sleep, as if to have his appendix out - but not to wake. There was an atmosphere of subdued media circus - not satisfactorily macabre, however, since the entire performance was concealed behind a weird scrim of discretion and vagueness, none of us knowing exactly the moment when Timothy McVeigh died. His life winked out unobserved by the millions. This was capital punishment as a sort of Zen, the sound of one hand clapping...