Word: gal
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...understand the grip vodka has on Russian culture, one need only to look at its name: vodka is a diminutive form of the word voda - Russian for water. The average Russian drinks 4.75 gal. (18 L) of pure alcohol a year, mostly in the form of vodka. Distilled from grains or potatoes, it has no real taste. It is not sipped; it is not savored. In fact, there's no real reason to drink it except to get drunk. With an alcohol content of between 40% and 55% (80-110 proof), vodka is consumed as a shot, usually...
That year, the Russian army revoked shops' liquor licenses and confiscated over 140 million gal. (530 million L) of vodka. (Unsure what to do with the oversupply, the government gave the vodka to scientists, who used it in experiments - one of which led to a new kind of synthetic rubber.) Prohibition remained in effect during the 1917 revolution and subsequent civil war. But when the teetotaling Bolsheviks ran low on funds, they rethought their stance; by 1925 vodka was back on the shelves of state-run dispensaries. In World War II, every Russian soldier at the front was given...
...pipeline accident just before New Year's Eve that dumped a massive amount of diesel fuel into two tributaries of China's Yellow River has exposed how far the country has to go before it can ensure the health of its imperiled waterways. An estimated 40,000 gal. (150,000 L) of diesel fuel spilled from a China National Petroleum Corp. pipeline in northwestern Shaanxi province, some two-thirds of which flowed into the Wei and Chishui rivers. Hundreds of workers have set up a series of temporary barriers in an effort to prevent the fuel from reaching the Yellow...
...work in front of the mike was a different matter. What aspiring movie star goes into cartoon voice work? One who has the comic aptitude for it. Murphy provided the voice for Gloria the penguin, the hero's gal pal in Happy Feet, as well as Tank the Eighth Grader on the Disney animated series Pepper Ann. By the time she was 20 she'd won the role of Luanne, Peggy Hill's dizzy niece, on King of the Hill - and, just because she could, she also voiced the role of Bobby Hill's best friend Joseph (until Joseph...
...awakens to observe that Wyoming is "very quiet. I thought I could actually hear my cells dividing." His role as sinning husband is to confess and win his wife back, but Grant's function in the film is to provide a running commentary on Parker's cartoonishly tense career gal. ("A week ago," he tells his Wyoming hosts, after Meryl proves her mettle with firearms, "she was basically Amish.") Grant can't do much with the rest of the movie's banter, long mothballed in the Museum of Old Jokes. One bit comes from the Jack Benny Gagbook, circa...