Word: barrelers
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...more truck-line routes than track mileage, and it has even tried to sell airline tickets at its whistle-stop stations. Last week the Southern Pacific chuffed off into yet another sideline. Through its new $30 million, 800-mile Los Angeles-El Paso pipeline surged the first barrel of gasoline. When rfie flow hits a peak, Southern Pacific will deliver up to 20,000 bbls. daily to towns in New Mexico, Arizona and California's lush Imperial Valley...
This was a breakthrough. It changed all the equations of scientific war, and it forced on the Department of Defense a grave decision: to concentrate intensively on the ICBM. No longer did the intercontinental ballistic missile need to hit a one-mile "pickle barrel" to be effective. A T-N (thermonuclear) warhead in the megaton range (equivalent to millions of tons of TNT) would blot out a large city even if it exploded well outside the city's limits, and its radioactive fallout would have a killing effect a long way downwind. So the ICBM, besides being fairly small...
...Australia almost every day, and sometimes three or four times a day, lottery barrels revolve with the roar of express trains. Flagged to a halt, the barrel is opened, and a distinguished guest with a chromium-plated "extractor" begins withdrawing white-numbered marbles that bring small fortunes to the holders of correspondingly numbered tickets. Even the bored lottery clerks buy tickets, as recently happened in Western Australia when Clerk Neil Watts, writing down the numbers as they were drawn, shouted, "Hey, that's me!" discovered that he had won a $6,750 jackpot...
Australia's lottery-barrel polka began 75 years ago when Tattersall's Racing Club began holding sweepstakes on horse races (the Irish Sweepstakes, say Australians, are a pale copy of "Tatts"), became a national pastime between World Wars, when state governments set up lotteries as a means of raising additional revenue (approximately 40% of the take). This year, riding out a prosperity boom, Australians are expected to buy close to a hundred million lottery tickets (variously priced from 30? to $225 each) for an expenditure equal to about $10 for each man, woman and child in the country...
...Another $13,500 prizewinner, arrested for drunkenness after celebrating his win, promptly bailed out all his fellow tosspots in the city jail, explaining: "They're a very nice crowd." Such incidents are routine for lottery-covering newsmen, but last week all Australia waited breathless while the big Tasmanian barrel roared to a stop and English Cricket Star Alec Bedser reached for the marble that would pay someone more than half a million dollars. In the Sydney slum suburb of Redfern, Mary Milner fell on her knees as she heard the number read out over the radio: it was that...