Word: airless
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...vital forces had been decaying in this manner for several weeks when a phone rang in my dark, airless, and bitterly cold cubicle one day in the first week of January. Overwhelmed as it was by the whistle of the arctic gale forcing its way through fist-size holes in the plastic wrap covering my window, the sound of the ringer at first hardly reached me through the pile of soiled rags into which I had burrowed for warmth...
...looked at me skeptically. "Giving someone tickets to an Alan Alda movie is not the moral equivalent of giving them a vacation in the Florida sun. It's more like giving them a vacation in a dank and airless...
...this record had begun as live riffs, spontaneous bits of popish nonsense in the best Squeeze tradition, they might have gone somewhere. Rather, the Fab-Four-that-almost-was (they're actually five now) worked very hard on pulling off a masterpiece in the sterile confines of an airless studio. The result doesn't snap, it rarely crackles, and it never pops...
That evening, hundreds of anxious parents gathered in the school's airless auditorium. They chanted, "Two, four, six, eight, no AIDS in any grades!" and waved placards proclaiming OUR CHILDREN WANT GOOD GRADES, NOT AIDS! Local politicians stirred the pot. "This is not meant to scare you," City Councilman Joseph Lisa of Queens began, "but leading medical researchers throughout the world truly believe that this epidemic may well be the most serious epidemic in recorded medical history." Chimed in State Assemblyman Frederick Schmidt: "There is no medical authority who can say with authority that AIDS cannot be transmitted in school...
...tubes terminate inside an airless 16-ft.-wide aluminum chamber, each entering it from a different direction. Inside, the focusing lenses are arrayed around a pellet of deuterium and tritium, two heavier varieties of hydrogen atoms. Scientists hope that when the beams simultaneously hit the pellet, which is smaller than a grain of sand, the temperature of the pellet's outer surface will be raised to 100 million degrees, causing it to vaporize explosively. Just as a rocket is pushed forward by its tail exhaust, the vaporizing surface would exert a force inward, compressing the pellet to a density...