Word: ashtray
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...it’s existed there as a magical possibility. Growing up in Silicon Valley—where computer chips tend to garner far more excitement than “impractical” things like poetry—the idea of a place in which people gather round the ashtray Saturday nights to discuss Kafka’s lost manuscripts seemed incredible. Sure, that initial perception may have been laughably idealistic. And yet everything I watched, read, or heard about seemed to bolster it: Columbia-based Jewish literary criticism...
Novelist Orhan Pamuk, a Nobel laureate, said in a lecture yesterday that he was once a naïve young man who read while lounging beside a stinking ashtray at home in 1970s Istanbul...
Although Dwight Eisenhower quit his wartime four-pack-a-day habit before taking office, smoking in the residence was still common, with ashtrays on the tables at state dinners and free cigarettes for guests. Lyndon Johnson quit before taking office, as did Ronald Reagan, who nonetheless didn't mind if visitors smoked. When French Prime Minister Jacques Chirac lit up in the Oval Office, Reagan's personal secretary recalled, a china dish was quickly found to serve as an ashtray...
...there were men like him who sat around hawker centers at night over a Guinness Stout and a cigarette - men who wore open-necked shirts and small gold chains around their neck. They would sit for hours at a time, then grunt an observation, tap the cigarette on the ashtray and then shake their heads." Images like this make the reader want to read Poon on Singapore, not London, Toronto or New York City...
Next may or may not be prescient, but it's definitely bad. It's about--to pick a few examples from its ashtray of half-finished plots--a man who gets treated for cancer and survives, only to find that unscrupulous doctors have patented his family's cancer-resistant cell line and are trying to harvest it by force from his relatives. Also, a scientist who inadvertently crosses his genes with that of a chimp and creates a talking monkey. And some other scientist who comes up with a gene-therapy treatment that makes irresponsible people more mature. Had enough...