Word: alertness
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...alert [and] speaking to people," Bossert said. "We talked about the Ohio State-Syracuse football game...
What is needed here is a mouth alert -- THIS IS NOT A TEST, YOU ARE IN REAL DANGER, LOCAL AUTHORITIES ARE HIDING IN THE CELLAR WITH A JUG -- because Whoopi, dreadlocks, attitude and all, is branching out. Quick, what does the worldy night and twice on Saturday. The negatives, as they say in politics, are encouraging: no monologue, no band to tootle when inspiration flags, no giggling studio audience to which the camera can pan, and no Dan Quayle jokes unless Quayle himself makes them...
...today more sophisticated systems can alert people as much as a minute before a city starts to shake. "This is possible," explains Massachusetts Institute of Technology geophysicist M. Nafi Toksoz, "because seismic waves propagate through the earth's crust relatively slowly, 5 to 8 km/sec. With an extensive network of sensors, we can locate the epicenter and determine the magnitude of an earthquake. This gives us the opportunity to warn people in outlying areas." How long a warning depends on the distance from the epicenter. Had such a system been in place in Mexico, for example, residents of Mexico City...
...absurd the civil defense training courses imposed on them at school and work. They refer to the courses as grob, taken from the first two letters of the words for civil defense -- grazhdanskaya oborona. Translation of grob: coffin. The cynicism was justified. In 1988 an accidental air-raid alert in the industrial city of Perm sent hundreds of thousands of people scrambling for safety. As a test of civil defense, the accident proved a disaster. Perm residents found many shelters locked, flooded or infested with mosquitoes...
Sometime this summer -- it's probably already happened -- you will hear that hateful little trump. At the first sound of its intensely annoying whiny hum, faint but frantically high-pitched, you'll hold stock-still, on full alert, hand raised at the ready. And then: splat. One less mosquito to trouble the peace of man and beast...