Word: steam
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Someone had this great idea for Holland America Cruises: for $1,400 per person, the 650-bed S.S. Statendam would steam from New York to Florida for the Apollo 17 launching, then sail through the Caribbean while a band of intellectuals discussed what it all meant. Some never showed up: specifically Arthur C. Clarke, co-author of 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Rocket Titan Wernher von Braun. But Novelist Katherine Anne Porter (Ship of Fools) was on hand to describe the launching as "rather glorious." So was Norman Mailer, who argued that the space shots should have included experiments...
...like a scene from Dante's Inferno. An incredible belch of flames against the night, ominous clouds of steam and smoke, and finally a thunderous, earth-shaking roar that assaulted the senses and numbed the minds of the 500,000 spectators gathered on nearby Florida beaches and highways. As the Apollo 17 Saturn rocket began to lift ponderously from Cape Kennedy's launch pad 39A, the entire sky was filled with an orange-pink glow, a false dawn against which gulls and pelicans wheeled and fluttered in aimless confusion. The awesome spectacle marked a fitting beginning...
...shape. Advanced art, that is. The diagnosis: condition feeble. The prognosis: poor. The avant-garde has finally run out of steam, whether in Munich or Los Angeles, Paris or New York; the turnover of styles and theories that gave the 1960s their racketing ebullience (Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism, Op, Pop and so on) has been followed by a sluggish descent into entropy. There seems to be no escape from that spiral...
What's worse than trying to sleep to the drip-drip of a leaky faucet? That's right. Trying to study to the clank-clank of a steam pipe. That's what the average stall-user has to contend with daily in Widener Library. With all respect to Widener's age and reputation as a bulwark of books, the place has at least this one uningratiating side. I guess you'd call it just old-fashioned wind. At any moment, the quiet of your stall is likely to be shattered by a god awful, devil-inspired cacophany of thumps, whacks...
Anderson's game, also a Sicilian defense, included a next gambit, sacrificing a bishop on the 17th move. But the steam went out of him when he found he's he missed his ride back to Cambridge. "I ended up having to hitch," he said...