Word: gondolas
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...engineering at the University of Brussels, but his first love was always the free-ballooning he did with his twin brother Jean. After years of practice in conventional balloons, the tall, scrawny professor with his outlandish head of wispy white hair, designed his own gasbag, his own spherical, airtight gondola, squeezed into the risky contraption one morning in 1931 and climbed 51,775 ft. over Augsburg, Bavaria-almost two miles higher than any airplane had yet flown. Just a year later Professor Piccard soared aloft to set a second altitude record...
...Strings, Noelle also hints of charms the play never asks of her, much as it could use them. Noting this, Critic Walter Kerr fondly observed that her "mouth turns up at both corners like a gondola," a suggestion of affability that leotards alone cannot convey. She exults in pronouncing her dozen or so lines, testing her new command of English with a Webster's enthusiasm for the language...
Down the long sweep of the Grand Canal came the gondola, a slender vessel reminiscent of older, statelier times. But there was something that looked like a propeller shaft projecting from the craft's bottom; the gondolier had abandoned his classic, nonchalant stand at the stern to crouch at the center; and the boat emitted wild gusts of fumes and roars that shook the lagoon city into outrage...
Outrage is exactly what the strange craft was intended to provoke. The stunt of putting an outboard motor in a gondola was perpetrated by Gino Macropodio, who led his 350 fellow gondoliers in their latest protest against the growing encroachment of motorized craft in Venice. The motoscafi, strikers pointed out, violate the canals' 7-m.p.h. speed limit and kick up waves that further weaken the foundations of the slowly sinking city. Some motorboatmen also violate the city ordinance limiting their working hours from midnight to 6 a.m., carry passengers and small freight afterhours in competition with gondolas...
...Europe, too, termites are marching inexorably north. French termites have moved from Bordeaux to Paris. After a long trek up the Italian boot, other termites are now dining on Venice's peppermint-striped gondola hitching posts...