Word: gimmick
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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With unwonted hoopla, the New York State Medical Society announced last week a new gimmick in blood banking. Under its "blood assurance program," the head of a family can sign up at one of the member blood banks and, in return for one pint of blood each year, get a certificate entitling him and each member of his family to a maximum of four pints of transfusion blood. A single individual is assured of all the blood he may need. A family in which nobody is qualified to give blood can get in on the plan if a friend...
Subtitled "The Literary Debris of Mitchel Hackney," Wallach's new one is especially funny because of its novel gimmick. Hackney, says Wallach, is one of the great unsung literati of our era, great because he managed to do everything years before it was done by the person we credit with doing it. Hackney, for instance, out Saroyaned Saroyan and out-Bellowed Saul Bellow, and did it first. "Gutenberg's Folly" is therefore a labor of love: dying from a surfeit of chopped liver canapes, Hackney willed Wallach his wife and his work...
There was, of course, a gimmick in the "give-away." The government figured to get most of the money back through its high personal income taxes. But the builders managed to beat the game by treating their windfalls as capital gains, which were not taxed so heavily. Only momentarily outsmarted, Congress, in 1949, passed an act freezing the windfall assets for a three year period. But by 1952 the frozen assets began to thaw, and the builders began to collect...
...high temperature (which favors efficiency) without high pressure, another reactor will have heat-resistant graphite as its moderator and will be cooled by a molten sodium-potassium alloy. Still another will have a novel gimmick. Its cooling water will be allowed to boil, and the steam generated will be used directly to drive a 5,000-kw. turbine. This cuts out the conventional heat exchanger used in the reactor of the submarine Nautilus to generate nonradioactive steam. Dr. Smyth did not say so, but the turbine will probably become so radioactive that it cannot be approached by humans...
...paper, Swiss federal law looks straightforward and strict enough. It sanctions abortion only if birth of the child would constitute "a danger menacing the life of the expectant mother or seriously menacing her health with a grave and permanent affliction." The gimmick is that in each of Switzerland's 22 cantons the law is interpreted according to the conscience of the majority...