Word: aridity
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...main problem of lakemaking in arid areas is not in getting the water-it is almost always to be had by deep drilling -but in holding it. The new solution is a lake lining of seepage-proof polyethylene plastic only six millimeters thick (asphalt and clay break up under water after a time; cement is too expensive). The two top companies in the field, both in California, are Palco, Inc. of Indio and Kepner Plastics of Torrance. In a bulldozed lake basin, plastic is laid down in strips up to 40 ft. wide and 400 ft. long at the rate...
...Also in dire need of repair: the area's intricate, ingenious system of underground conduits -called Qanats-which have been used for hundreds of years to distribute water from mountain springs to the arid plateaus...
...Marilyn Monroe is embarrassment. First taken by the world only as a vapid comedienne, she strove to become both an actress and an intellectual, and in death somehow became something more. As the London Daily Mail noted, her death has "impoverished the public stock of harmless pleasure." The arid, senseless argument that follows it-suicide or accident?-only heightens the general shame in a quibble over whether a token of death amounts to death itself. To say that she died while trying to live (the hand on the telephone) only avoids the issue of her unhappiness, turning despair into...
Still another prong would consist of measures to divert land from production of crops now in oversupply-a temporary five-year "soil bank," plus a special plan for transforming wheatlands on the arid western fringes of the wheat belt into grasslands for grazing cattle...
Thirteen years ago, Packard persuaded the villagers to let him irrigate 100 acres of their arid, salty plain to grow rice. Within five years. Packard's project in Anthili and other towns had converted Greece from a country that annually imported $5,000,000 worth of rice to a nation that exported $5,000,000 worth-on an initial U.S. investment of $43,000. Other Point Four schemes trained a Greek agricultural staff to teach 8.000 villages such basic matters as tractor maintenance and cheese making, instructed technicians to operate a new electrical power system, reorganized an archaic police...