Word: wind
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Their extreme sport is called BASE jumping, whose acronymic name derives from the four types of structures that its unusual athletes leap from--buildings, antennas, spans (bridges) and earth (cliffs). Equipped with rectangular canopy chutes, toggles for steering, a knowledge of which way the wind is blowing, no reserve chutes (as compared with skydivers) and a special arrangement of brain cells, participants jump to conclusions from great and forbidden heights, or from little ones where a chute has little time to open. Until they release their chutes, they fall at 60 m.p.h. The end is often unsatisfactory...
...last week when Thor Axel Kappfjell, 32, known by the oxymoron Human Fly, leaped from a 3,300-ft. cliff in his native Norway in a fog, was flung back by an ill wind onto the cliff's face and was killed. His death came 15 years after that of Carl Boenish, one of four people who invented BASE jumping in 1980; Boenish also died in a leap from a Norwegian cliff. Before one begins to hatch a Scandinavian-unhappiness theory to explain all this, it should be pointed out that BASE jumpers have died all over the world...
...week and by some accounts ate a full box of Metr-X bars for breakfast each morning, resulting in a perfectly sculpted body, with abs that would put any shirtless celebrating member of the U.S. women's soccer team to shame and with power that could knock the wind out of a production assistant during spirited office-time slam dancing, the latter thesis of which I had the displeasure of confirming. Needless to say, any fear I had of failing at my task multiplied considerably when I realized that this individual would be the ultimate judge of my work...
...through fields of jagged boulders and knee-deep snow toward the summit of Colorado's Mount Bierstadt last week, Denver banker Don Pritchett looked forward to the splendor and isolation of the 14,060-ft. peak. But when he reached the top, he found he had to share the wind-torn precipice with nine other climbers and a Labrador retriever. According to a logbook wedged in the rocks, a dozen more climbers had already beaten him to the summit that morning...
...devices on guns are inadequate. NAACP president Kweisi Mfume told TIME that the organization will seek not financial damages but injunctions ordering the industry to make several changes in its distribution and marketing practices. Among them: improved monitoring of distributors and retailers to better ensure that handguns don't wind up in criminals' hands, and firmer restrictions against selling more than one gun to an individual. "The proliferation has been an ongoing, evil threat to innocent men, women and children in our communities," Mfume said. "We've got to step up our advocacy...