Word: maundering
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Dusky Belaga, pop. 25,300, could be any quaint town in the American heartland. As the sun creeps down, joggers maunder the quiet streets. Old men in wifebeaters gossip and smoke over slow cups of coffee in a café right next door to a licensed ammunition dealer, across the street from a well-kept park with a picket fence. A few kids shoot hoops nearby at a shabby basketball court whose bent rims possibly never even had nets. Somewhere in the direction of the town's lone evangelical church, a weed-whacker hums...
Grisham's Law It should be a snap to adapt a John Grisham thriller. Read the novel, compress the exciting first half, rewrite the rest, keep it moving. Well, the films of The Firm and The Pelican Brief maunder and mope as if Grisham were Graham Greene. Not that it makes any difference. The Firm was 1993's third biggest grosser; Pelican is a cool Christmas...
Analyzing tree-ring data from 5,000-year-old living bristlecone pines and even older dead ones, Eddy reported in 1976 that their carbon-14 content seemed to vary in rhythm with sunspot numbers. When sunspots were rare, as they were during the Maunder minimum, the amount of carbon 14 in the tree rings increased markedly; when they were numerous, the amount decreased. The explanation: during the sun's more active periods, its magnetic field, which ordinarily deflects some cosmic rays away from the earth, expands and becomes an even greater barrier to the rays. As a result, less carbon...
...tree-ring data revealed other 50-to-100-year intervals in the past when carbon-14 production was high and the sun apparently quiescent. But did this mean that all of these periods were times of extreme cold? Many scientists doubted it, suggesting that the correlation between the Maunder minimum and the little ice age might be nothing more than sheer coincidence. Changes in solar cyclic activity, the doubters argued, were not necessarily accompanied by variations in the sun's output of heat and light and probably did not affect terrestrial weather and climate...
...instrumental bridge is a string quartet; the coda is also counched in lush strings, with Askew contributing a haunting, wordless "Madame Butterfly" type aria. This segues into an instrumental, "Acropolis Now," which begins promisingly as a hybrid between '80s rock and Greek folk guitar, but it begins to maunder soon after and degenerates into a fairly close approximation of a jam session by a forgotten, early '70s band. The side closes with the title track, which reverses the problems of the opening cut; a suitably anthemic chorus is surrounded by a song about a "young boy" named "Johnny" who could...