Word: balloon
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Bouncing Message. The wind carried the balloons at 30 m.p.h. high over a line of low, dark hills on the horizon, where lay the Czech border. At 30,000 feet, the rubber balloons exploded, releasing thousands of leaflets. Another type of balloon, pillow-shaped, of glistening, translucent polyethylene, slowly oozed hydrogen through the plastic pores and sank to earth; it would give a ghostly effect as it bounced along the ground over hedges or lodged against walls and trees. On it, in five-inch letters, was printed the single word svoboda (Czech for "freedom"). Inside were more leaflets...
Cautious Contact. What might the balloon barrage accomplish? Crusade for Freedom is not, so far, suggesting revolt, for revolt-like General Bor's in Warsaw -can be premature and disastrous. Instead, the balloons are an imaginative experiment in contact, bearing a message of hope until the time might be ripe for other words...
...down a 15-inch-gauge, 500-yard track scooted two not-too-reasonable facsimiles of the Emett trains (rechristened "Far Tottering and Oyster Creek"), past weird scenery erected along the line: flat-footed cows, crooked lampposts hung with lobster pots. One train had a candy-striped engine with a balloon-shaped boiler and an elegant, winged smokestack; the other had spidery wheels, a teapot boiler and potted pink geraniums on top. Midgets dressed up as policemen were hired the first week to direct the delighted crowds which flocked about Britain's own Toonerville Trolley...
...testimony continued-part of it played scratchily from long, tape-recorded interviews with addicts-spectators got an astonishing picture of a strange new city: New York as it appears to a "junkie." It is a city where "pushers" peddle their wares almost as casually as sidewalk balloon vendors, where children sniff heroin even in classrooms, where an innocent-looking drugstore or cafeteria may be an addicts' hangout...
Entrants will be given handicaps according to whether they are riding balloon-tired, thin-tired, touring, or racing bikes...