Word: flushes
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Piratical Origin. What stands in the way of CATV is the pre-cable entertainment industry. Flush with profits, the industry maintains powerful lobbies in Washington and boasts powerful friends; at least 30 Congressmen hold interests in TV stations, and most Federal Communications Commissioners are traditionally either drawn from the industry or go to it after they leave the commission. Conventional TV broadcasters do have very real grievances, for CATV could be piratical unless properly regulated. It was started to bring television to isolated or poor-reception areas. CATV entrepreneurs raised hilltop antennas, plucked the signals of distant channels from...
...long forms by mail (up to 73 questions) before sending them in last week faced no such questions. The touchiest disclosures they were asked to make were how many children the women in their homes, whether they were married or not, had borne, and whether their quarters had flush toilets. The Census Bureau rejected questions that some governmental agencies wanted it to ask, such as whether the respondents used contraceptives, were illiterate or were paying alimony. The short form (23 questions), received by 36 million households, could easily be completed in 15 minutes or less...
...Royal-Flush Odds. Even random selection techniques fail when the lists are unfairly drawn to begin with. In a recent New York case, for example, Attorney Michael Finkelstein produced evidence showing that a federal grand jury list included only 1.1 of every 10,000 voters in Harlem, compared with 62.6 of every 10,000 voters from the city's fashionable and predominantly white East Side. A statistician testified that the chances of obtaining that disparity in a random selection were smaller than the probability of a poker player being dealt 24 consecutive royal flushes in a fair game...
...ARGUMENT that tear gas is more humane than artillery is compelling but misleading. In Vietnam, it is used to flush out the enemy from his hiding places and then conventional fire mows him down...
...Buchwald's first play, Sheep on the Runway, is a cartoon allegory. Flush with military hardware but low on brainpower, a group of bumbling, do-good-ing, fast-talking Americans lead a small, neutral Himalayan nation in Asia into a deadly heap of trouble. The difficulty with themes like this is that a playgoer is not quite sure whether he is experiencing the shock or the drone of recognition. An audience should never know as much as or more about a play than the playwright does...