Word: crazed
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...determining factor was practicality: Chanel wore bell-bottom trousers in Venice, the better to climb in and out of gondolas, and started the pants revolution. Sometimes, it was purely accidental: after singeing her hair, she cut it off completely, made an appearance at the Paris Opera, and started the craze for bobbed hair. But always, a Chanel idea commanded respect...
Historian H.G. Wells started the craze in Britain with Little Wars, a 1913 book codifying the rules of toy battles that he and his friends fought out near his country home. Many of today's rule books draw heavily on Wells' work, devised, as he put it, to attract "boys of every age and girls of the better sort." With deadly seriousness, Prussian officers originally developed the idea in the mid-19th century to hone their tactical skills for actual warfare. Today, of course, professional war-gamers play out their grim battles in locked rooms in Washington...
Menzel, who served as a "trouble-shooter" for the Air Force during the flying saucer craze, is well-know as a debunker of reports that unidentified flying objects are actually spacecraft from another planet. He is the author of Astronomy, a popular survey of the field, published last month by Random House...
...percentage craze is growing wilder. According to its latest ads, Score makes hair "juicy" and "actually 12% plumper." The account people at Wells, Rich, Greene, the agency that dreamed up the ad, insist that this figure was established in microscopic measurement tests. Similarly, Crisco Oil claims that it splatters 35% less than other oils. To determine this percentage, Procter & Gamble research men say they repeatedly collected the splatter of eight frying oils on aluminum foil and measured the weight of the sheets...
Often spurred by the utilities' own advertising campaigns, Americans are so avid for laborsaving machines that power output now doubles every ten years to meet demand. By the end of the century, some experts say, the nation's electricity requirements may well rise sixfold. Worse, the kilowatt craze poses serious problems not only for power companies but also for nature and human health...