Word: dampness
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...Russell Lucas' Bombay streets. A London bank manager for many of his 61 years, the Anglo-Indian Lucas makes his literary debut with a collection of 10 stories as tightly constructed as bejeweled Indian snuffboxes, all odd springs and curious kinks. Nearly every one is pungent with the "damp hessian, methylated spirits and freshly planed deal" of Bombay in the '40s, and colorful families "big in rawolfia serpentina and chinchona bark"; the protagonists are mystics, madmen and hermaphrodites. And nearly all describe episodes of heat and lust, watched through homemade cracks by randy teenage boys. Inside the cunning boxes...
Squabbling occurs during 501's damp, disorganized first nights. Ranger Brad Wolgast, 21, an eagle scout and psychology student from Kansas, observes privately that the troop's adults and boys communicate poorly. "Things get left unsaid," he explains. Staff members at base camp tell of a stressed-out troop that tied one of its hikers to a tree earlier this year. Philmont chaplain Rusty Cowden, 38, remembers his own trek in 1967: "We got lost. A bear ate our food, and it rained 11 out of 12 days." But Cowden recalls the trip joyously. Coping with blisters, bears and soggy...
...hardscrabble Vermont farm country. A slippery statehouse politician named Ed Cobb tries to persuade Henry Briggs, a retired major- league relief pitcher, to run for Congress on the Democratic ticket. Briggs, a born-and-bred Vermonter and no fool, knows this is like taking a high dive into a damp dishrag. But they talk. And talk. And Briggs and his wife Lillian argue. And argue. She's an earache. When he was in baseball he played around, and now she's getting back at him. Talk is plot is literature...
...Saudi cities, but they have found another use for their prophylactics. Soldiers are placing condoms over the muzzles of their machine guns to protect them from airborne sand. In World War II, ground troops sometimes used "French letters" to keep their guns from jamming in the European damp...
...junior Peter Richards slammed in seven goals, leading a 20-10 Crimson rout at MIT's Alumni Pool last night. Richards and omnipresent hole man Chad Barker teamed up for seven of eight first-period Harvard tallies, squelching any chance of an MIT victory before their Speedos were even damp...