Word: barrelling
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...candidate Dukakis radiates a far more simplistic version of cause and effect. "I speak to you as the Governor of a state which twelve years ago was bouncing around at the bottom of the barrel," he said in Tipton, Iowa. "Twelve years later we have a 3.5% unemployment rate, and we're now an economic showcase. How did it happen? Because we worked at it. We invested public resources; we got the private sector in; we involved citizens, mayors, business people...
...below the Nevada desert last Feb. 3 was puny by most measures. Equal to about 40 tons of TNT, a mere .2% as strong as the Hiroshima blast, it would be feeble in a missile warhead. But in space, packed into the closed end of a stubby barrel and tamped down with hundreds of thousands of metal pellets, the low-yield weapon could wreak havoc. Unlike a standard nuclear explosion, which would vaporize the pellets and barrel, this one would spray the pellets through space at speeds up to 100 times that of a high-velocity rifle bullet. These pellets...
...Parliament sat listening as a colleague expounded on the history of the islands. "Peace and harmony is the governing principle on which the Fijians have been running their lives," said Taniela Veitata. "This is in contrast to what Mao Tse-tung believed -- that political power comes out of the barrel...
...photographs you used of the frescoes before cleaning look disgustingly cruddy, while those taken afterward are washed down, inpainted and appallingly Disneyish. It is true that Michelangelo's lunettes had suffered from water seepage and required some restoration, but the vast barrel vault itself was relatively pristine; it did not need cleaning. The frescoes now present a fresh Michelangelo whose tie has been straightened to the strangulation point and whose ears are scoured until the ears themselves disappear. The "conservation" that has been done on the Sistine Chapel may be good for tourism, but it is death for the frescoes...
SOMETIMES WHEN the weather is right I'll check in on the Cambridge City Council. This is really scraping the bottom of the barrel. I keep on hoping that one day they'll make a mistake, like misfiling some documents and banning Honduran refugees instead of nuclear weapons. But it hasn't happened yet. It would be unethical to create a furor merely for the sake of writing about it, so I couldn't submit a proposal to outlaw chrome-and-nylon eight-wheeled baby strollers. Maybe I will anyway...