Word: billiards
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Hunt is an emotional arsonist who starts fires in others simply to watch them burn. Semple becomes his natural prey. Hunt constantly involves him in schoolyard beatings without ever fighting himself. He goads Semple into cramming a billiard ball into his mouth, dislocating his jaw. Finally Hunt taunts him into a shed where Hunt's own girl lies, ready to seduce him. Semple finds the confrontation so frightening that he loses all hold on rationality, murders the girl, and is committed as criminally insane...
According to one gambler, Leverett House poker is "a family affair." Jock, who organized the game, went to Lechmere Sales last fall and bought a poker table. It is octagonal, covered in billiard-green felt. There is a small well in front of each player to hold his chips. The table cost $42, so Jock sold $6 shares to seven friends. Two percent of each evening's winnings are set aside for cards and cokes. There is a list of about 50 players and their phone numbers are tacked to the side of the table. Most of the players...
...Negro servants in white coats and black bow ties. A servant calls a club man "Mr. Bradley," and a club man calls a servant "Thomas." After dinner, the club men retire to their walnut-panelled parlor to talk, smoke cigars and sip coffee. Then they wander off to the billiard tables downstairs or to the studies and library upstairs. Everything is refined and muted and comfortable...
...flights. Jupiter's gravity, for example, would exert a tremendous pull on a passing spacecraft, accelerating it greatly and deflecting its course. Thus Jovian gravity could be used, in effect, to gain both thrust and a mid-course correction without the expenditure of fuel. Space scientists, like expert billiard players, can precisely determine the amount of acceleration and degree of deflection by careful control of both the velocity and course of the spacecraft as it approaches Jupiter...
While the use of the interplanetary billiard technique drastically cuts travel time, Stewart says, it does little to reduce the large amounts of fuel and great initial thrust required to send a spacecraft to the distant planets. But another rapidly developing propulsion system, the solar-powered ion engine, may well solve that problem in time for the flights of the 1970s. Using electricity generated by solar panels, these engines produce a stream of ions (charged atomic particles) that provide a minute amount of thrust - usually measured in hundredths of a pound...