Word: fernando
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Paul Thomas Anderson is out to prove the obvious: that we live in a chance universe, that coincidence and mishap play a larger role in our destinies than we like to think. In Magnolia he intertwines four disparate (but equally glum) stories of people living in California's San Fernando Valley and shows how they touch--or fail to touch--one another in the course of a single, very long...
...herding's biggest draw is undoubtedly the dogs. "If one of our dogs fell in a river, we'd jump in and save it," says Ted Ondrak, who runs the San Fernando Valley Herding Association with his wife Janna. The Ondraks are professional trainers and breeders, but their clients--movie stars and sales analysts, attorneys and seismologists--tend to feel the same way. Most get hooked on herding after buying a dog that needs a job. "Border collies are incredibly smart, but they get psychotic if they don't have work," says Lilliam Cummings, 42, whose two dogs devoured carpets...
...Shaun Fernando, a junior at Texas A&M University, embarked this fall on a rite of passage that began in 1909. Alongside 5,000 of his classmates, he helped construct a massive tower of wood that would be torched before the Thanksgiving-week football game against rival University of Texas. In October, Fernando pitched in for "the Cut," early-morning trips to nearby fields to fell some 5,000 oaks. Afterward students broke ground on the edifice, pounding two thick pine trunks end on end 10 ft. into the earth to serve as a central support. Last week came...
...Fernando had the night shift last Thursday when, at 2:28 a.m., he saw the 44-ft.-tall tower and "a little flinch in the sky." While he looked, "the whole thing came down." As it toppled, the scores of kids who were on it scrambled. The lucky ones escaped. The rest were entombed in a mess of logs and wires. After close to 24 hours of furious searching, there were 12 dead and 28 injured, some critically, and a heartbreaking pile of questions: Did the center pole snap? Were sufficient precautions taken? Was there any adult supervision...
University officials canceled this year's bonfire, but many on campus, the injured and eyewitnesses among them, want it reinstated next fall. "Yes, it hurt a lot of people," says Fernando. "But it should be carried on in the spirit of tradition." Twenty-four hours after the collapse, students honored another campus ritual known as Silver Taps. A bugle summons students to remember classmates who have recently died. That was a tradition no one disputed...