Word: flatly
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Like many of Western civilization's finest achievements, the long and scrumptious history of waffles can be traced to ancient Greece, when Athenians cooked obelios - flat cakes between two metal plates - over burning embers. The word waffle is related to wafer, as in the communion wafer - one of the only victuals that early Catholics could eat during fasting periods since wafers didn't contain animal fats, eggs or dairy products. During the Middle Ages, when bakeries decided to compete with monasteries in the wafer market, the secular - and considerably tastier - waffle was born. (See the top 10 food trends...
...France is trying to bring back the party to the skies. There are six bars on the plane, which encourages passengers to mingle (in their own class, of course). In the front of the upper deck, in the business section, there's even an art gallery of sorts: flat-screen TVs displaying digital previews of the New York and Paris cultural scenes, a somewhat lavish use of space...
...strangest thing about these animals isn't their names, though; it's the fact that many of them weren't flat to the ground, like modern crocs, but stood upright and walked on their legs, like modern mammals. "We have an idea of what a crocodile should be and what a mammal should be," says Sereno, "but you have to break down these categories to see what was going on in Africa back then." BoarCroc, for example, was 20 ft. long and had three rows of fangs, like a boar from hell, which made it what Sereno calls a "dinosaur...
...suspects, "it probably ran down the bank to escape from dinosaurs." Bucktoothed RatCroc was also small and ate a similar diet. DuckCroc, about 3 ft. long, had a broad snout for rooting in shallow water and onshore, ducklike, for fish and frogs. And PancakeCroc was named for its wide, flat head, which it kept low, jaws open, waiting for an unsuspecting dinosaur to step into the mouth. "Modern crocs can take prey three times their size, if necessary," says Sereno - which means that the 20-ft.-long PancakeCroc could have taken down some reasonably large dinosaurs, like a multiton, long...
...with an antenna, a car in the garage, a chicken in every pot and two kinds of lettuce (light green and dark green). Now the average house is more than 50% bigger, the car is twice as powerful (and there's often more than one), the TV is flat and gets 900 channels, and we expect the grocery store to have strawberries year-round and about 50 flavors of mustard. Small wonder we started charging our life-insurance premiums on our credit cards; we only expected to pay when we died...