Word: airlessly
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Other characters seek refuge from anxiety in airless logic, superstition, nostalgic memories, magic or endeavors like Film Critic Mitchell Prettyplace's 18-volume study of King Kong. There is a plot of sorts. The antics of Pynchon's odd crew cover a conspiracy to build their own V rocket and fire it off. Aimed at what and for what purpose? Who knows? Making a rocket from scrounged parts seems to be like making a philosophical system or a mystic cult. It is something humans simply have...
There was good reason for the excitement. The orange hue indicated that the lunar material may have oxidized, or rusted. That, in turn, meant that it had probably been exposed to water or oxygen. The only likely source for such vapors on the arid, airless moon were volcanic vents in the lunar surface. Indeed, some scientists had suspected earlier that Shorty Crater (which resembles volcanic vents on earth) had been created volcanically rather than by the impact of a meteorite (which is how most of the moon's craters are believed to have been formed). As they await...
...certain nostalgic romance about it. Its reality, of course, has always been bleaker. Before Warden Clinton Duffy took over in 1940 and turned "Q" for a time into a model for penal reform, the vast sand-colored fortress on San Francisco Bay offered sadistic guards, shaved heads, the airless "hole" for solitary, dinner out of buckets and a gallows painted baby blue. But then, San Quentin compensated for its miseries by being fairly easy to escape from. Sometimes 60 or 70 prisoners at a time would go over the wall...
...Irwin captured on film added new dimensions to the landscapes they had transmitted by television from the moon's surface. There were shots of majestic mountains with profiles softened by billions of years of erosion, midnight-black rocks that glittered like jewels in the harsh sun of the airless moon, and helmeted figures toiling in areas of almost unbelievable desolation. "Although a dead world," said Astronaut Irwin in his published report, the moon "can be beautiful to anyone who loves the mountains of earth." The mountains of the moon, he remembered with pleasure, "were not gray or brown...
...toxin, one of the most deadly poisons known to man. (One ounce of the poison is enough to kill the entire population of the U.S.) The toxin is produced by the hard-shelled spores of the Clostridium botulinum bacteria, which lie dormant in !he soil but flourish in the airless environment of canned foods when they are improperly processed. Heating at 212° for five hours or at 240° for 30 minutes is sufficient to kill the bacteria during the canning process. But occasionally food is unsufficiently heated, particularly during home canning. (The FDA investigation seemed to point...