Word: whir
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...What Is Frightening? A: No Longer Senorita Alien. When alien infighting occurs in the cage of pain constructed by pony-tailed hippies, all you see is a whir of cellophane and custard. When the camera slides down the back of the alien like Fred Flintstone leaving the quarry at quitting time, we can only think of Spielberg's T. Rex--a death blow to the spit-and-steel horror of the original alien beast. Which brings...
...orbits or so, the crew kept up this orbital hit-or-miss, searching doggedly for the sun. Finally, at well after midnight on the morning of June 26, an instrument panel flickered to life, then a cabin light. Behind the walls, a fan started to whir, and a pump started to pump. One system at a time, instrument by instrument, the battered Mir recovered. By 2 a.m., more than 14 hours after it had sustained an injury that should have claimed its life, the world's only operating space station was working again...
...sadder than the end of the Nixon era (marked by tears and the whir of an airplane), the Reagan era (no more jellybeans in the White House) or the Bush era (no more incomprehensible press conferences...
...mold all this diverse material into a single book. He renders, as tellingly as ever, the magic of individual moments. A movie begins in a small theater: "The heavy purple curtains drew back and the orange side lamps dimmed and in the air above their heads, with a racheted whir, a shuddering shaft of light surprised a few winged bugs, suddenly turned into darting, looping stars." But to fill up the long stretches between inspirations, Updike relies on recitations of headlines and on reams of relatively undigested research: how to grow and pick asparagus, how to operate a suppository-making...
While many of their friends hang out at a bar on a Saturday night, many said they are frequently stuck in some office in some town in New Hampshire planning next week's schedule, while overhearing the constant whir of the nearby fax machine...