Word: elixir
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...whole, cheap oil has far more positive effects than negative ones. Says Robert Ortner, chief economist for the Commerce Department: "It is a very potent boost for the economy." Since energy costs make up about 10% of the Consumer Price Index, smaller oil bills provide the economic elixir of growth without inflation. Many businesses get a huge profit lift from lower energy costs. The airline industry, for example, saves $110 million for every 1 cents drop in jet-fuel prices...
...trivialities rooted in popular culture. By treating everyone I spoke to as my equal I was able to learn amazing things about country life. For example, I had no idea fried peat moss is a delicacy to be washed down with a steaming mug of Junior's yellow country elixir prepared in the backyard shed. Really, my hosts were too kind...
...suffragist meetings and protests continued, the first woman who personally challenged the political hierarchy was the electrifying Victoria Claflin Woodhull of Homer, Ohio. Beautiful, energetic and not entirely scrupulous, Victoria and her younger sister Tennessee practiced many of the popular quackeries of the day: seances, psychic remedies, a bottled "elixir of life." Inspired, she said, by a vision of Demosthenes, Woodhull and her sister went to New York and arranged to introduce themselves to the newly widowed Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt, 84. With her "magnetic treatment" Tennessee soothed the railroad tycoon so successfully that he backed the young sisters in opening...
CONSISTENTLY, Anderson's most oblique attacks are the most potent. The creepy Dr. Millar (Graham Crowden), is a brilliant 1980s cross between Drs. Frankenstein and Strangelove. He sings the praises of modern science while placing a human brain in a blender and then proceeding to drink the elixir. He creates a patchwork-quilt human being out of the spare parts of patients, and when the head he has selected proves non-functional, he thinks nothing of lopping one off of an errant news reporter (Malcolm McDowell). Yet Anderson has by now amply made his point about the ominous potential...
...work to do. Physical labor is a status symbol that an Enu pays to perform. An Enu need not raise a sweat even for food. The natives and their inadvertent guests eat excrement processed to look like conventional food. Ambrosia comes from the sewers. Guano is refined to an elixir of life...