Word: spasmed
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They made the past two weeks look like the bad old days as Northern Ireland lapsed into a spasm of violence and madness. Angry members of the Orange Order chose Drumcree to confront the police and British troops barring their march down Garvaghy Road. They said they were merely claiming their basic civil right to walk the Queen's highway, but they fear that if their marching stops, they will lose their dominion over the six counties of the North. The sensible among them called for keeping the protest peaceful, but each night, gangs of Protestant youths resorted to violence...
...Sure, it's un-American not to back the underdog, but even the hardworking, muttily named Utah Jazz (did Satchmo summer in Salt Lake?), with its working-class Mailman and great white hopes, couldn't drag us away from Jordan's charm. For a spasm of a second last month, it seemed O.K. if Larry Bird's Pacers won the conference championship--there was mythological resonance to the protagonist's being felled by a warrior ghost--but by Game 7, we were right back in our proper seats behind Jordan. We wanted one more hit of Jordan's hyperintensity...
...happened somewhere between the clunky premier episode (Lucy Thinks Ricky Is Trying to Murder Her) and her first classic routine, the Vitameatavegamin commercial, in which Lucy gets steadily soused as she keeps downing spoonfuls of the alcohol-laced potion she's trying to hawk on TV. (Watch the spasm that jolts her face when she gets her first taste of the foul brew; it could serve as a textbook for comics well into the next millennium.) I Love Lucy debuted on CBS in October 1951, but at first it looked little different from other domestic comedies that were starting...
...made with no return whatsoever (the Bunting Institute and the Schlesinger Library are already thriving entities); and they are to be made solely in order to allow Harvard to vaunt before the world how much it has done for women--in a kind of belated public spasm of political correctness--by affiliating to itself a "Radcliffe Institute." More materially, these sacrifices are to be made so that Harvard may garner unto itself all alumni/alumnae dollars--it is currently prohibited from fundraising directly from Radcliffe classes prior to 1977--and that it may absorb into itself Radcliffe's considerable endowment...
...when you link a fantasy culture to the wondrous American inventory of guns, you may now and then get a little terrorist. Guns fire vicious daydreams into the actual. Squint and point, and one magic trigger-finger's twitch, the merest spasm of impulse, may send the world into mayhem. That is a power so seductive that it might even have a little Satan...