Word: balloon
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Volunteers in Spokane, Wash., Muscatine, Iowa, and Washington led local tours of hypothetical nuclear devastation. Hundreds of black, helium-filled balloons were released in Houston and Chapel Hill, N.C., each balloon carrying a note about windswept nuclear fallout. In Belle Glade, Fla. (pop. 18,000), as in many communities, local churches sponsored a showing of The Last Epidemic, a film distributed by Physicians for Social Responsibility about nuclear war's medical horrors. Doctors from several hospitals described the same bleak scenario at a rally in Philadelphia...
Construction of MATEP eventually had to halt, with only the contested engines needing installation. But the defeats and delays meant more than unanticipated embarrassment for Harvard; the successful stall tactics of the residents of Brookline. Mission Hill and Jamaica Plain also made the plant's final pricetag balloon by some $1.5 million per month. It now stands at $230 million, several times original projections...
...baby blue van veers into the parking lot of Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in West Hollywood, Calif. It is an increasingly common sight these days. Out of the van comes a clump of helium-filled balloons, bobbing in the expensive air. They are blue and silver: it's a boy. Next, a balloon bouquet of pink, pearl and white: a girl. In Hollywood, where trendiness is a measure of sincerity, sending flowers to mothers who have just given birth to babies went out with designer jeans and saying "Trust me." These days the modish gift is balloons...
Until now. If it is chic to be pregnant, it is not necessarily chic to look like a helium-inflated polyester balloon. It is no longer necessary, either. Fashion, like Big Business generally, has had to make its own adjustments to maternity. And where fashion has not provided, fashion has been ignored. The racks still hold their share of flapping, color-blind muumuus that-depending on the relative age and condition of the wearer-proclaim either an imminent arrival, an imperative diet or a Tupperware cookout after sundown. Increasingly, though, women are working at their careers until very near delivery...
...noted astronomer Edwin Hubble. In the late 1920s, using the 100-in. Mount Wilson telescope, then the world's largest, Hubble discovered that everywhere he looked in the heavens, the galaxies seemed to be moving away from each other, like flecks on the surface of an expanding balloon, their speed increasing in direct proportion to their distance. By assuming the universe was expanding, astronomers used that ratio to reckon the universe's age and size. Trouble was that the Hubble constant proved notably fickle, as succeeding generations kept measuring the distance of different celestial bodies and getting different...