Word: forte
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...many times can you spell it before the car gets to the other side of the bridge [THE PULSE OF AMERICA, July 10]? Oh, the memories for those of us lucky enough to grow up near her banks! My own Tom and Huck built their secret fort near a bend in the "mighty Miss," and I could only feign mild consternation when stories of stashed cigars and stolen Playboys were finally confessed. I wish all kids could experience a bit of "life on the Mississippi." If nothing else, they would learn to spell. BERTEIL MAHONEY Laguna Niguel, Calif...
...nations-at-sea. In Honduras, an American engineer is about to start building a huge steel float called Freedom Ship, intended as a home for 50,000 people who will make their own laws and form a country unto themselves. In Britain's North Sea, an old gunnery fort called the Principality of Sealand is attracting investors who hope to make it a digital utopia, storing people's electronic secrets free from any government interference. How do these brave new seaworlds stack...
...According to Wednesday's USA Today, boot camp ain't what it used to be. At Fort Jackson, S.C., the Army's largest basic training facility, attrition rates, which stood at 23 percent in December 1998, are expected to dip below 10 percent. The recruits aren't any better - it's the training that's become more merciful, holding on to would-be dropouts with "a raft of programs to help woebegone trainees graduate...
...That was the name we had for the Physical Training Remedial Program when I went through basic training at Fort Jackson for nine weeks last fall. It was (to us) the dark and hopeless purgatory for the chubby, lazy or just physically confounded who couldn't pass their PT test the first, second, third or seventh time. People went there and disappeared from view, but they rarely went home. The Army, strapped for recruits in the economic boom times, wasn't about to lose anybody just because they couldn't hack it right away; they were willing to wait...
...same debate in the barracks, and "It's too easy" was one of my main complaints in the dispatches I sent home from Fort Jackson (that and the boredom, and for a while my sore feet). Ask drill sergeants, and some blame gender-integrated training, others the "doggone Nintendo generation," others the end-of-camp customer-satisfaction-like surveys that actually ask departing trainees what they thought. (Somebody does read them, and the squeaky wheels are apparently getting the greasing.) The saddest part came at the end, when, after two months of taunting us with threats of expulsion...