Word: bells
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...winner was NBC's galloping "news correspondent" Tom Brokaw, fresh from his exclusive prime-time pow-wow with Gorby in Moscow. He still has trouble pronouncing words that begin with the letter "L", but he was in charge throughout with the help of the same bell that rings when letters are turned on Wheel of Fortune. Candidates knew their minute was up when a soft electronic bell was cued, much like Johnny Carson knows he has to break to a commercial when the pianist breaks into arpeggios...
...recent "innovation" developed by Bell Lab's Department for Creative Sadism currently is attempting to doom the human race to extinction by exposing the public to fatal doses of irritation. The project--code named "Call Waiting"--promises to be to humanity what massive and ubiquitous mud pits were to the dinosaurs...
...thousands of professionals to carefully listen to our telephone conversations. Their job is to make disruptive clicky sounds at key moments indicating that there is another "call waiting." Ideally, this will cause us inadvertantly to hang-up on the people to whom we already were speaking. The people at Bell Labs find this very funny. The technique is most enjoyable during important conversations...
...regional companies get less money from access charges, they could ask regulators to raise local rates to replace lost revenue. That has happened several times. Since the Bell system was broken up in 1984, AT&T has reduced its long-distance rates by 34%, but the cost of local service has risen from...
...heirs to the great public writer-thinkers like H.L. Mencken and Thorstein Veblen, whose works set directions and standards 60 and 70 years ago. Nor, he notes, have successors emerged for the current senior generation of broad-gauge university scholars like David Riesman, John Kenneth Galbraith and Daniel Bell, with their insights on society and the economy...