Word: dike
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...caught the bug at age 14, when he happened to hear a Saturday-morning radio show devoted to Bechet, one of the all-time great clarinet and soprano saxophone players. "I heard it, and it just sounded wonderful," he recalls. "It was sort of like an opening of the dike." With the facility for self-teaching that he would later demonstrate as writer and filmmaker, he laid his hands on a soprano sax and started to learn it. Bechet's driving, growling virtuosity on the sax, however, proved too difficult to emulate, and Woody soon switched to clarinet...
...biggest project, a $24 million pumping station would divert millions of gallons of silt-rich Mississippi River water onto the coastline to help stop saltwater intrusion and to supply sediment that will build up the eroding land. At least one parish is considering plans for a backstop dike to give residents time to escape should the sea finally reach their doors...
Ironically, the most conservative President since Herbert Hoover has found his veto power no more effective than a thumb in the dike in stanching a flood of progressive (the "L" word is no longer used in capital environs) legislation. By the time Congress adjourns in mid-October, it will have compiled a record in passing landmark activist legislation exceeded in recent years only by the Great Society 89th Congress of 1965 and 1966. Says House Speaker Jim Wright by way of explanation: "There were pent-up needs too long deferred." Adds Senate Majority Leader Robert Byrd: "We were too long...
From his helicopter window, the President could see little last week except a brown ocean of muddy floodwater. In one area, all that protruded from the earth's watery surface were some straw roofs, treetops and a narrow stretch of broken dike-top roadway 20 miles long. At least 220,000 people had taken refuge on this chain of tiny islands, and were building makeshift shanties. Some had managed to bring along their cows and goats, which were being kept alive on a diet of water hyacinths. Elsewhere, survivors were obliged to fight off poisonous snakes that had sought refuge...
...executives drafted a resolution condemning the Reagan Administration's antidrug efforts as ill conceived and poorly executed. When Attorney General Edwin Meese appeared before the group to defend the Administration's record, the mayors were not impressed. "All you're doing is putting a lot of fingers in the dike that is about to collapse and drown us in the trenches," fumed Mayor Joseph Daddona of Allentown...