Word: arid
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Maggots. Haled into court for fraud, Matthew Gorer does not defend himself; instead, he lectures the court and the public on the arid conventionality of a society that accepts art only if it has been certified by recognized authorities. "So to show you what's going on I set about painting a picture which everyone would praise without fail, for all the wrong reasons. I wanted to show up the pundits and the cranks, the speculators and the snobs, the whole bunch of maggots...
...nose. An attendant handed him a notebook labeled ''Log Book of the Spaceship Vostok II.'' With exaggerated care, Titov examined the pencil dangling from the log, and remembered: "Yuri Gagarin did not attach his pencil firmly and lost it." Then the hatch clanged shut, arid soon Vostok II lifted through the clear air to carry Titov on the longest journey ever made by man -nearly 435,000 miles in 17 hurtling orbits around the earth...
...Dams. Furtado's plan begins at the arid roots. For years water-craving northeasterners built dams willy-nilly, saw them fill up in the rainy season, then slowly and uselessly dry out when the rains stopped. Furtado plans to send the stored water through irrigation canals, increase irrigated acreage from 37,000 acres to 247,000. He hopes to wean farmers away from one or two soil-killing crops, put wasteland to work, build silos and warehouses to store food for lean years. Electricity lines are already snaking into the northeastern backlands, industry is getting tax reductions and other...
...most publicized and embarrassing blots on Britain's colonial record was the government's highhanded treatment of Seretse Khama, 39, who is hereditary chief of the Bamangwato tribe in the arid, sparsely settled British protectorate of Bechuanaland. Twelve years ago, when Seretse was a law student in London, he met and married a blonde clerk named Ruth Williams. In the resulting uproar, the British government peremptorily banished Seretse from Bechuanaland in an attempt to appease the outraged segregationists in neighboring South Africa. "A disreputable transaction," growled Winston Churchill at the time. But Seretse stayed banished for six years...
Though it is twice the size of Texas West Africa's arid, landlocked Mali Republic (pop. 3,700,000) has little claim to fame beyond being the place where Timbuctoo is. Last week the news from Timbuctoo, now a crumbling mud village on the edge of the Sahara, was that the Russians would soon be there...