Word: aeronautics
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...best. North is set in the same quasi-Victorian alternative universe as Pullman's Golden Compass, where every human is accompanied by a talking-animal soul mate called a daemon. It's a prequel, the story of how a young and not-yet-grizzled Lee Scoresby, gunslinging aeronaut extraordinaire, and his rabbit daemon, Hester, first met up with armored polar bear Iorek Byrnison. Nobody writes dialogue for gunslingers like a Brit: "Damn, Hester," Scoresby says, "you don't hit a drunk man with a stick." And, of course, nobody anywhere writes dialogue for bears like Pullman...
This odyssey is not merely an epic adventure. "The achievement won't be just to go around the world," says the man behind the project, Bertrand Piccard, "but to encourage a complete paradigm shift on how we use energy." Piccard, a 49-year-old Swiss psychiatrist and aeronaut, knows a thing or two about high-altitude derring-do. In 1999, he and a partner, Brian Jones, became the first people to circumnavigate the earth in a balloon, but it rankled Piccard that doing so required burning nearly four tons of propane gas. "The balloon flight was a personal dream...
...Darkly handsome, like the hero of a Bront? novel, Dorrington is also as haunted as Heathcliff or Mr. Rochester. As a 14-year-old experimenting with explosives, he had lost parts of two fingers; later, in Sumatra, a colleague died in an airship crash for which the aeronaut still feels guilt. Occasionally oppressed by his melodramatic mien, Herzog turns to Dorrington?s Guyanese assistant, the gentle, mystical Mark Anthony Yhap. But the attempts to get the White Diamond up are at the heart of the film. And when, accompanied by beautiful choral music, the airship finally rises to soar over...
...same as Phileas Fogg's, the means even less down to earth. In a gossamer-thin (.004 in.) polyurethane balloon rigged with a 14-ft. by 10-ft. unpressurized gondola, famed Aeronaut Maxie Anderson, 46, set out from Luxor, Egypt, last week, along with fellow Businessman and Adventurer Don Ida, 47. Their plan: to travel eastward around the world-south of Iran and the U.S.S.R. (hostile airspace), south of the Himalayas (deadly to balloons), over the Pacific and North America to an eastern Mediterranean landing spot-in less than ten days. To complete the high-speed journey, the eleven...
...having a giant bag of hot air settle on their land. Farmers are the most difficult to handle, explains Balloonist Alice Megaro, because "pigs and horses get very upset-though cows couldn't care less." A few find it cheerful to carry a supply of marijuana. Noted one aeronaut as he floated placidly above Albuquerque: "At this altitude, you only need half a joint...