Word: blots
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...money, you don't want the IRS on your case. The agency can and does garnish wages and place liens against or confiscate property. A credit-card company is a pussycat by comparison. Sometimes it will simply write you off as a cost of doing business and place a blot on your credit report. At worst, it will hand off your debt to a collection agency, which can plead and annoy but not confiscate. And should you file for bankruptcy, the first debts a judge discharges are often those related to credit cards. Tax bills almost never get forgiven...
...tidal wave) hundreds of feet high, flooding the coastlines of surrounding continents. "Where cities stood," he said, "there would be only mudflats." A land hit, he calculated, would blast out a crater at least 30 miles across and throw up a blanket of dust and vapor that would blot out the sun "for weeks, if not months...
...which whizzed within 120 million miles of Earth. Countless people turned out and craned up to see it--among them 39 members of the Heaven's Gate cult who took the comet as a sign that it was time to take their lives. That they did, leaving a dark blot on a brilliant event...
Foale, however, had a handy way to figure it out. If he held up his thumb at arm's length, he could blot out a patch of sky equal to about 1 1/2[degrees] of arc--a point of reference he could use, along with his watch, to determine how fast a spacecraft was moving. Foale swam over to the window, spent a few minutes watching stars come and go behind his thumb, and swam back to Tsibliyev and Lazutkin. "Tell them we're moving one degree per second," he said...
They were, of course, the lucky ones. Between 1933 and 1944, America's record in admitting refugees from Nazism was dismal, a moral blot. Less than half the already stingy immigrant quotas were filled because of the timidity of Franklin Roosevelt and the pigheaded xenophobia of his Under Secretary of State Breckinridge Long. Those in the arts had no special exemptions, of course; but by a combination of stubbornness, string pulling, blind luck and the help of a tiny number of devotees and friends in the U.S., some did get through, settling for the most part in Manhattan...