Word: distractibility
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...police van during what was officially termed "mobile pursuit tactics"-could take the edge off the festivity. Australia's Nobel-prizewinning Novelist Patrick White suggested that the wedding was "a kind of rosy women's weekly romance to lull the more soft-centered among us and distract us from reality." There was, however, no sense that anyone wanted to forget the country's troubles. Said Donald Williams, 18, a skinhead who came to London from his native Portsmouth to celebrate the nuptials: "I was standing next to a black, and when he cheered I said...
Hospital patients previously condemned to loud daytime television are blissfully recovering to Pavarotti, and some dentists offer headphones to distract from their drilling. Adds Boston's Corley: "People use them to fall asleep. I hear these things are going to replace Quaaludes." Detroit Law Student Richard Green has found one potential hazard: "I put on my earphones when I fool around with my girlfriend. But sometimes the cord gets...
...tente with the West in the form of trade, arms control agreements and cordial political atmosphere-as long as these goals can be achieved without compromising what the Soviets see as their security interests. Second, they are always looking for-and frequently finding-ways to weaken and distract Moscow's main adversaries, the U.S. and China. And third, once they have decided that the Soviet Union's vital interests are threatened, they exert force massively, without compromise or vacillation...
Hirsh believes that sexy ads may distract consumers: they "don't hear how good the product is," he says. J. Walter Thompson's U.S. chairman Burt Manning has another concern. His worry: "Numbers of viewers are going to conclude that 'only a flaky segment of society would respond to that kind of advertising. I don't want to be like those people, so I'm not going to wear that kind of brand.' " The products will be noticed, he says, but the ads will be turning consumers...
...commercial aircraft, has weighed in with statistics showing that two-member crews on planes like its own 737 or McDonnell Douglas' DC-9 have better safety records than the standard three-person complement flying most other planes. One reason, says Boeing: the extraneous third person can sometimes distract the other two at critical moments...