The annual ratings-slayer first cemented its place in modern Christmas lore in 1986, when, in the stuff of clip-show history, chief cad "Dirty" Den Watts served wife Angie with divorce papers.
When mystery became the stuff of the past, of medievalism and of Gothic romance, a "mystery" came to mean a kind of fiction, stories — in the United States, those of Edgar Allan Poe, above all — in which something that first appears inexplicable and even supernatural is submitted to explanation, through the art of detection.
When mystery became the stuff of the past, of medievalism and of Gothic romance, a "mystery" came to mean a kind of fiction, stories in the United States, those of Edgar Allan Poe, above all in which something that first appears inexplicable and even supernatural is submitted to explanation, through the art of detection.
Things have improved dramatically in the UK since the days when "wife-beating" was the stuff of jokes and marital rape was not a criminal offence – it finally became illegal for a man to rape his wife in 1991.
Because of loopholes in the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA), a law last updated in 1986 when "the cloud" was the stuff of science fiction, there are gaping cracks in the warrant requirement for digital communications like email and cloud storage.
In retrospect, John E. Tobin Jr. is not quite sure exactly when his life turned into the stuff of spy movies.
But this is visceral music, and Mr. Levine's volcanic reading had a peculiar, nostalgic ring: not so much for Ravel's early-20th-century Paris as for the early days of stereo LPs, when works like this were the stuff of demonstration-quality hi-fi spectaculars.
But although this technique works well for metallic atoms on metallic surfaces, it falls down when the substances are semiconductors, the stuff of microchips.
This was back in the early '70s, when self-serve gasoline was still the stuff of science fiction, as it remains today in New Jersey.
