Word: pile
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...surrounded it. TV reporters try to sweet-talk their way into the principals' homes. Friends and relatives battle over selling their stories to Hollywood. "Mom, when they make the movie, can I play myself?" asks Wanda's daughter as if she were seeking a lift to the mall. Layers pile on layers: we watch as Wanda watches herself on Donahue and A Current Affair; the film's producer and writer appear as themselves; and the entire story is framed by a videotaped "interview" with Wanda wearing a new blond hairstyle but the same bone-chilling self- assurance...
...humanities classes, these fine distinctions are even harder to make. Faced with a pile of papers which are all decently written, grammatical, properly researched and well-reasoned (not too much to expect from the average Harvard student), a grader who "must" fit the actual distribution of students' abilities into a bell-curve model of grade distribution will have no measurable criteria for winnowing students, and will pick the "best" papers based on such concerns as which ones coincided most with the grader's own views and methodology...
...danger is highest just after a storm because the snow crystals have not had time to forge bonds to one another and to crystals in the existing snowpack. Typically, bonding occurs over a few days' time. Under certain conditions, however, the crystals never bond, but remain loose like a pile of poker chips. This dangerous situation commonly occurs in Colorado, where temperatures are very cold (snow crystals bond most readily close to their melting point). The shape of the crystals is important too. A layer of graupel -- soft hailstones that behave like miniature ball bearings -- substantially increases the avalanche hazard...
...dunes, which maintain their overall shape despite winds and sandslides. Researchers at IBM's Thomas Watson Research Center built an artificial dune, a tiny sandpile sitting on a sensitively balanced plate, to study this behavior in detail. In one experiment, they dropped 35,000 grains of sand onto the pile one by one. As the sides grew too steep -- in some cases, by only a single grain of sand -- avalanches would make the pile collapse. Then it would start growing steeper again, until it was time for the next avalanche...
...sixth year as head coach, Brian McCutcheon has seen what used to be a dynasty of college hockey sink the bottom of the ECAC and Division 1 pile. Cornell has lost six straight games and is tied for second-to-last place in the ECAC. The only light at the end of the tunnel for Cornell is the last game of this season...