Word: drain
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...gods impose a heavy economic drain on the sparse resources of their worshipers. The merchants of Port-au-Prince sell a good proportion of their expensive French perfume to black farmers who buy a bottle of Arpege or Chanel No. 5 for Maitresse Erzulie. One of Granny's converts paid a houngan $60 (about two years' cash income) for a can of something to bury in his garden to protect his crops and family...
...courses from getting too easy. With balanced, steel-shafted clubs and hopped-up golf balls, good players were going out on established courses and easily smacking their tee shots past once-dangerous hazards. Duffers and mediocre golfers were running into all the trouble. Architect Jones has been forced to drain swampland, dam creeks and rearrange sand dunes in his continuing effort to lay out holes with both character (i.e., a combination of problems and pleasure) and beauty. He always tries for the balance that will satisfy the average amateur and try the skill of the professional...
...proposed a vigorous attempt to build an H-bomb (after the Russians exploded their first A-bomb), "Dr. Oppenheimer strongly opposed the development of the hydrogen bomb on moral grounds, on grounds that it was not politically desirable," as well as because the H-bomb program would be a drain on the orderly development of the fission bomb program. Said the report: "Until the late spring of 1951, he questioned the feasibility of the hydrogen bomb efforts then in progress...
...happened that your offices in New York had been swept away by some fervid desire to drain the lifeblood from local citizens and had established a blood-donor center on the main floor. Unwittingly, I entered the building and presented myself at what seemed to be a reception desk. The lady behind the desk was overjoyed to see me, and I thought that the public-relations staff of the magazine had been particularly diligent in its indoctrination. I was asked my name, my habitat, some personal history and my blood type. This again was ascribed by me to be part...
Second Nile. Ley does not bother with dams across ordinary rivers; he picks the Congo, .which drains much of Africa's rain forest through a steep-sided valley near its mouth. A dam at this point, says Ley, would form a lake big enough to cover California, Nevada and Oregon. The water would flow northward to fill an even bigger lake (the Chad Sea) in the Sahara, and eventually drain into the Mediterranean. The lakes would presumably improve the climate of much of Africa, and boats would reach the continent's heart through the "second Nile...