Word: flock
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...remote. True, there have been false alerts, and Ground Zero's Roger Molander recalls a bizarre incident in the mid-1960s when a newly installed radar warning system mistook the rising of the moon for a massive Soviet missile attack. Still, the fear that a faulty computer chip, a flock of geese or a mad lieutenant could push a crisis beyond the point of no return has been exaggerated...
...placed in the mouth of the child to ensure its allegorical purification. In the Christian catechism, salt is still a metaphor for the grace and wisdom of Christ. When Matthew says, "Ye are the salt of the earth/' he is addressing the blessed, the worthy sheep in the flock, not the erring goats...
Then Major Biestek took command in the way he knows best: airpower. With recruits from a local model airplane club, he sent up a squadron of a dozen remote-controlled planes to engage the starlings in dogfights. Said Biestek: "When you saw a flock coming in, you just aimed an airplane at it. The airplanes have a very high fright index. We got rid of well over 95% of the birds." The starlings were only scared to death, not actually dead; no bird casualties have been confirmed. But five of Biestek's planes were downed, two permanently...
...that had marked, more than any other, the joy of his papacy. But that same scene now also calls up memories of the assassination attempt nine months ago. Last week the Pope was trying to complete the healing of those wounds by turning again to minister to his worldwide flock...
...trouble. There were technical foulups: Ed Asner and Elizabeth Taylor were momentarily trapped in the folds of a falling curtain, like big game in a tree trap. The pace slowed: "I can't read my monitor," James Earl Jones rumbled like an Old Testament prophet rebuking his flock. Most of all, the pretension showed: birthday candles were lit on a cake that looked like the Tower of Babel, as discomfited luminaries dished up decades of encapsulated world history in which the Actors' Fund got featured billing ("A Russian named Pavlov used dogs to study conditioned reflexes...