Word: fixing
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...staff job on The New Yorker. "He thought he'd be only a humorist," Mary remembers. "He didn't think of himself as a serious writer." Yet he spent words profligately in an attempt to translate his painter's eye into language, to catch and fix the thing seen and bring all the colors and shapes and textures of the visible world to bear on his narrative. Novelist John Earth calls Updike the "Andrew Wyeth of literature," adding: "I think one has the same mixture of admiration and reservation for the work of both...
...first, Khe Sanh's barren landscape presented problems for the B-52s' radar system, which usually takes a fix on a prominent ground feature, such as a bridge or high building. To solve that, the U.S. employed a recently developed system called "Sky Spot." Using a power ground-control center on South Viet Nam's coast, Sky Spot directed the bombers to the general area of their destination. There, on hilltops miles from the fighting, the U.S. placed meshes of wire that acted as radar reflectors and electronic beacons that emitted continuous signals. Gauging the distance...
Swiss Pool. The three largest Swiss banks-Credit Suisse, Union Bank of Switzerland and Swiss Bank Corp.-have formed a joint gold pool to share purchases, sales and profits. In place of the London dealers' twice-daily meetings (10:30 a.m. and 3 p.m.) to fix the price of gold, the Swiss-bank traders confer about prices every few minutes throughout the day over direct phone lines. Instead of collecting a commission, the Swiss charge buyers of gold more than they pay sellers. That "spread" started out as high as $3 per oz. in the first days after...
...odyssey of cockney mechanic Allnut (Humphrey Bogart) and missionary Rose (Katharine Hepburn) down uncharted African waters suggests tense comedy-melodrama: they must, after all, evade rifle fire, skirt rapids, fix boilers, swat flies, brave swamps, remove leeches, blow up German cruisers, and fall in love. Regardless, Huston injects the action with mechanical uncaring: Allnut and Rose talk genially in medium close shot, one of them looks off-screen, says "Look!", and Huston cuts to what they see; he resorts to this lethargic montage in introducing enemy troops, the fort, all rapids, and the boat Louisa. The repetition of dramatic technique...
Breathtaking Regularity. Getting a good fix on one of the signals, the astronomers calculated that it came from an object no more than 4,000 miles in diameter-about half the size of the earth-that was no more than a neighborly 200 light-years away. The signals occurred with breathtaking regularity, one every 1.337 seconds. "Our first thought," says Radio Astronomer Martin Ryle, director of the Mullard Observatory, "was that this was another intelligence trying to contact...