Word: births
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...indeterminate antiquity, she is known as Weekly, or the Newspaper of Claremont Street, because she cleans the houses and spreads the gossip in a prosperous old neighborhood of an unnamed Australian city. Weekly is a de facto tyrant. When a stray cat periodically invades her sparse room to give birth, Weekly knows that she can give away the kittens as presents to the children of her employers ("Oh Weekly you shouldn't have. Really you shouldn't"). Any household unwise enough to turn down such a gift risks full disclosure of embarrassing secrets. The cleaning woman wears hand-me-down...
WHEN PEOPLE really do call on the other line, the next round of aggravation is built right into the system. The first problem is the natural human aversion to clicking down the hangerup thingy in the middle of a conversation. We have been indoctrin ated from birth to associate such behavior with rudeness--tantamount to blowing your nose in the hand of a person trying to make a point during an argument...
...disease and high blood pressure. Alcohol eats away at the stomach and intestines, causing bleeding in some drinkers. Alcoholic males may experience shrunken testes, reduced testosterone levels, and even impotence. Sustained drinking sometimes disrupts women's menstrual cycles and can render them infertile. Among expectant mothers, drinking can produce birth defects and is a major cause of mental retardation in American children. Even the immune system's efficiency is reduced by alcohol. Studies are under way to determine whether heavy drinking might cause AIDS to surface more quickly in infected carriers...
...perhaps the most enticing book of the year. There are detailed recipes for such local delicacies as grapes in syrup from Greece and an Italian fried chicken in walnut sauce. There are tantalizing myths about ingredients and observations about subjects like the olive field: "Like the pains of child-birth, one quickly forgets the olive-picking pains." Forced to work with primitive utensils and sparse ingredients, Gray notes that "good cooking is the result of a balance struck between frugality and liberality...
...manufacturer. According to Herschel Elliott, an agricultural engineer at Penn State University, data released so far inadequately address organic pollutants, in which case, he says, "we should look for mutagenic and carcinogenic effects." Elliott notes that the studies show near unsafe levels of molybdenum. Such heavy metals can cause birth defects...