Word: cactus
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...through the sky 35,000 ft. above Yucca Flat, Nev. just before dawn one morning last week, and slowly opened its barn-sized bomb-bay doors. Forty-two seconds later, at 4:15 a.m., the desert below exploded into noonday brilliance. For five miles around, acres of Joshua trees, cactus and sagebrush burst into flame. A sturdy frame house ten miles from the explosion collapsed. In San Francisco, 600 miles to the west, people saw the incandescent flash; in Pasadena, 250 miles southwest, they heard the explosion as a rumble in the distance...
...Alley, the Rio Grande is a sparkling, star-filled stream that incites cowboys and senoritas to romance. Normally, the river is a chocolate-colored ditch, treacherous with potholes where many an unwary wetback has drowned. It swirls between banks of cactus and mesquite down 1,800 miles of rich, irrigated farmland to the Gulf of Mexico. Last week most of the lower Rio Grande, from Laredo (pop. 51,910) to its mouth at the southernmost tip of Texas, was a dry arroyo; at Laredo, the river ran dry for the first time since the International Water Commission began keeping records...
...song is now the town's own anthem, the occasion was marked with fitting energy. Through the first night the townspeople, bearing pinewood torches, paraded, fired Roman candles and danced. Next morning, with hardly more than a pause for some fiery 120-proof mescal (drunk with powdered cactus-worm salt for additional flavor), a new parade started...
Among the poor Mexicans and Yaqui Indians of the Southwest, witches still flourish as hardily as desert cactus, and fear of their dark power is as real as the daily struggle for a living. For years there has been no more powerful bruja on either side of the border than sly, dark-haired Maria Concepcion Estrella Miranda, leading practitioner of the occult in dusty Guadalupe, Ariz. (pop. 850). Few in Guadalupe did not believe that she could cause sickness or death simply by sticking bobby-pins with little doughball heads into any of the 200-odd photographs she kept secreted...
Matta best explains himself with paint on canvas, and it is obvious that what he has to say in his new show is richer and happier than previously. His ceiling-high canvas opposite displays a peacock softness and brilliance of color and a range of textures from cactus to satin. It creates the illusion of deep space, and hums with delicate, darting figures...