Word: balloonfuls
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...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...
...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...
...flight of a silvery balloon, man not only was transported but moved again last week. Double Eagle V, which lifted off and blew away from Japan on Tuesday, came down nearly four days later in a rainstorm near the little mountain town of Covelo, Calif. The four adventurers in the gondola-Ben Abruzzo, 51, Larry Newman, 34, Ron Clark, 41 (all of Albuquerque), and Rocky Aoki, 43, Japanese-born owner of the Benihana restaurant chain-drank champagne toasts to the first balloon to make it across the Pacific Ocean and then settled down to wait overnight for rescue...
Three years ago, Captain Abruzzo had piloted Double Eagle II across the Atlantic, a pioneering trip that was half as far and twice as calm. This time, he said, "things were very, very bad." The 26-story helium balloon leaked throughout the 5,070-mile journey. Ice built up on its thin skin, and thunderstorms wildly buffeted the craft. Losing altitude prematurely, the crew worried about not making landfall. In the crash landing, Aoki was briefly knocked unconscious. But they were down, no one was seriously hurt, and Abruzzo was asked once again why men do such things...
...massive civil uprising, Polish authorities could presumably start suppressing Solidarity's publications, banning union meetings and even arresting people accused of "anti-Soviet" attacks. All of these acts have in fact already occurred in scattered instances. But in the present atmosphere, any case of local repression could balloon into a major confrontation...