The belt is now turning dark after a brief fade to white.
The mezzo, though, is the singer of the earth, an earth knowing nothing of global warming as brief autumn fades to long-lasting winter.
In the midst of all this activity, the White House press briefing has faded away, replaced by a president happy to speak to his own set of facts.
Yet as the brief austral summer fades, for Hobart, the capital of the Australian state of Tasmania, it is big business.
The idea tends to attract brief attention, but fades away, in part because the Supreme Court long ago ruled that the Constitution does not permit the government to take a person's citizenship against his or her will.
PRISTINA, Kosovo - Most of the satirical songs written at the radio station KZOK in Seattle amuse listeners for a brief life, then fade from the air.
It hardly mattered because, in the years after he exhibited the most intimate moments of his brief marriage, Koons faded from view.
He learned the carrom ball from Ajantha Mendis, another Sri Lankan whose Test career was meteoric in the strict sense of that term: it blazed in brief glory before fading from view.
More to the point, some Republicans said, the surge of attention to these issues could well prove to be brief, and to fade quickly away if Mr. Romney can dispatch Mr. Santorum relatively quickly and return the focus of the campaign to Mr. Obama's performance on creating jobs.
And some events try to "assume a life of their own," in the composer's words: tremulous harmonies, plaintive choirs of woodwinds, groaning brass, skittish figures that flicker and fade, brief fusillades of percussion, and driving rhythmic riffs that threaten to take over but get quashed by the pervasive inner line.
