Word: fixe
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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There was one space left on the Lake Como ferry at Gravedona, Italy, and a little blue Fiat slipped into it. But that left the vacationing Sheik of Kuwait in an awkward fix: his three-car caravan (including one blue Cadillac, one black Cadillac) was only two-thirds afloat. No smalltime bey-decker, His Highness Sir Abdullah as Salim as Sabah quickly offered the ferryboat captain $16 to unload the latecomer and make room for the royal limousine. The Milanese tourist in the Fiat bid $32 to preserve the status quo. The Sheik bid $160. The Italian raised...
Inertial navigation systems are only as old as guided missiles, which brought to a head the brewing problem of modern aerial navigation: how to get a fix at great speed while all the usual sun and star angles are constantly changing. Solution: an instrument that records and remembers earth distance and direction traveled from a known starting point. One of the best systems was developed by North American Aviation, Inc. for the Navaho missile. The Navaho was scrapped, but last February the Navy ordered a Navaho guidance system installed in Nautilus. It was aboard the sub nine weeks later...
Swim By Instrument. In the narrow Bering Straits between Alaska and Soviet Siberia, Nautilus kept well within U.S. waters, popped up its radar antenna only once for about 30 seconds to take a radar fix. Did the Russians detect them? Anderson thought not. Detouring along Alaska's northern coast to avoid clogged-up ice, Nautilus surfaced for the first time since Pearl Harbor to get a sure fix on a DEW-line radar station, then headed down again into the fantastic beneath-the-sea new world of mountains and deeps that is the nuclear submarine's true element...
Dulcinea Smith is a witless, bromidic, meddlesome but well-meaning woman with a mania for engineering other people's lives. She gives a weekend house-party, and manages to have a finger in every pie and a foot in every mouth. She tries to fix her husband's business deals and do a little matchmaking on the side. She spouts cliches and misquotations with amazing volubility. It is she who arranges a bridge game before supper because "it would be sort of soothing," and then proceeds to ask whether hearts are higher than spades and whether she "should discard from...
...technician from Yale, taking a summer course in music, lived up to his fame for facile improvisation. Every time that something went wrong, the cry of "Mc Goo, fix it" went up. And he did. He manufactured a stage plug out of a piece of wood and scraps of copper wire, and he managed to rewire half the Harvard Union in an afternoon...