Word: buffs
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Uston read Beat the Dealer, a 1962 book by Mathematician Edward Thorp, the "father" of card counting. Uston, a statistics, mathematics and computer buff, was fascinated, and while still serving as a pillar of the West Coast financial establishment, began imagining himself a buckaroo blackjack hero. For six years he worked feverishly to acquire the necessary skills, practicing rigorous memory drills and doing complex statistical calculations. In 1974 he went to Harrah's Casino in Reno to put himself to the test. He won $3,000 and never looked back...
Nore spent his childhood years being dumped on a variety of kindly people. He does not know who his father was. His mother died of drugs. For one happy period of his childhood, he lived with a couple of male photographers, and became a lifelong camera buff. At one point, he was also left with a racehorse trainer and learned the steeplechasing dodge. "Things had happened to me all my life," he says...
...crews the B-52 is known as BUFF, a fairly loving acronym that stands for Big Ugly Fat Fellow. But there are Air Force men who think it should have been put out to pasture long ago in the Arizona desert, along with the retired squadrons of B-29s and B-50s. Some of them are hoping for a variant of the expensive but supersonic B-1 bomber, especially in view of the new Administration's defense policy...
...BUFF and one tanker aborted on the ground, victims of a balky generator and an engine "trouble" light that would not go out. A second B-52 had to quit formation; its right front-landing gear would not retract, so it could not keep up. Officially, the Air Force has high confidence in these old planes and the young men who fly them. Despite the much vaunted Soviet air defense network, they believe the B-52s can get through, take out their targets, and perhaps even return to base...
...story on the way to falling in love. Daryll is disarmingly direct in telling Tony how much he loves her, has always loved her, and always will. His offer to wax the floors of her apartment constitutes the season's most original metaphor for sexual foreplay ("Then I buff it gently, till it beams"), and, when he finally gets her into his bed, he warns, "I'll tell you right now, it's going to be wonderful." It is. Eyewitness is, after all, a romance of attractive opposites...