Word: booths
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After a stop at a booth where Khrushchev took a skeptical sip at a Pepsi-Cola. Nixon and Khrushchev went on to the exhibition's most publicized display: a six-room, model ranch house with a central viewing corridor so that visitors can see the shiny new furnishings. Soviet propaganda had been telling Russians in advance that the ranch house they would see at the U.S. exhibition was no more typical of workers' homes in the U.S. than the Taj Mahal was typical in India or Buckingham Palace in Britain...
...coin a phrase--the more things change the more they remain the same. In the 1930's the chief campus concern was: how many goldfish can a college student swallow at one sitting? Today, the great question seems to be this: how many students can inhabit a telephone booth at once? (A connection between the booth and the fish also arises from the fact that buthia is ancient Greek for "water animals...
...This spring, Cambridge University students announced that 15 of their number had squeezed into one phone booth. Students in South Africa then pushed the number up to 25. Not to be outdone by foreigners, 32 students at Modesto Junior College, California, claimed to have crammed themselves into one booth. And, the following week, the Oklahoma City University chapter of Lambda Chi Alpha managed to jam 33 of its fraternity brothers into one booth before 1500 cheering witnesses...
...scholarly investigators, we must posit a few questions. In California, the phone booth had been tipped over to a horizontal position. Was it still, then, really a phone booth? In Oklahoma, the phone itself had been removed. Thus we must ask: is a phone booth without a phone a true phone booth? (This recalls the famous query: does the sound of a waterfall exist if no one is there to hear it?) Then there is the matter of the booth's dimensions, variously reported as 3 feet by 3 feet by 7 feet and as 32 inches by 32 inches...
...present, however, give the claimants the advantages of the larger size, the absence of a phone, and the choice of the booth's position. The total volume of the booth is then 63 cubic feet. Assuming the average weight of the 33 students to be 140 pounds (a very conservative estimate), we see that the students weigh 4620 pounds, or 73.3 pounds per cubic foot of booth. Since a cubic foot of water weighs 62.4 pounds, we arrive at the figure 1.16 as the specific gravity of the students (not to be confused with the density of the students...