Word: corking
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...still flies whose chute failed to open at two hundred feet until his plane exploding just beneath him sent up a great blast of gas and flame-enough to blow the chute open, but not quite enough to set it afire, though the inside of it was blackened like cork. Another lieutenant swimming down a river had to fight his way through crocodiles, slashing at them with his heavy jungle knife. He escaped with a couple of nasty tooth marks in his shoulders. So far as is known, no American flyers have yet encountered the inland headquarters of the cannibals...
With Cromwell to Cork. The book is also a coolly masochistic self-revelation of Novelist Bowen. "I am ruled," she says, "by a continuity I cannot see." It is a continuity of spiritual rootlessness; and by "the savage and austere light of a burning world," Author Bowen attempts to explain this rootlessness (a universal malady) in local terms of the Bowens and Ireland...
Ever since the first alien Bowen muscled his way with Cromwell into County Cork, ten generations of Bowen gentry have had a mania for land. For without land the Protestant Anglo-Irish gentry had nothing. In Catholic Ireland, they were spiritual aliens, "people of the ruins...
...newly invented milkweed gin, a Michigan factory will next month start removing 1,000,000 lb. of floss from milkweed pods, for the U.S. Navy. The floss will replace kapok, formerly imported from Java, in l) life jackets where, like kapok, it is six times as buoyant as cork; 2) linings of flying suits, where it is as warm as wool but six times lighter. Next year farmers will be paid to plant free milkweed seed in 50,000 barren acres of upper Michigan...
Thiokol itself is not brand-new. It was accidentally discovered in 1929 by a chemist who was trying to concoct an antifreeze. Since 1930 it has been manufactured as a substitute for rubber, leather, cork. Typical uses: barrage balloon coatings, gas masks, gasoline hoses, washers, cable sheathing...