Word: graining
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...hated "line" is a 400,000-volt power transmission cable. After a two-year court fight, the line is beginning to slice a 160-ft.-wide swath through the dairy and grain country. It is supposed to run 427 miles, from the lignite coal mines of North Dakota to the vicinity of Minneapolis and St. Paul. Ironically, it is being constructed by two rural power cooperatives-the very sort of company that barely 40 years ago was warmly welcomed by farmers whose remote homesteads had been bypassed by the electrical revolution...
...socialist realism, as practiced?however fitfully?in Russia. There are no sweating boatmen by the rivers. Not even a dirty shirt in view. Everything is swept, ordered, prosperous. The happy people of Huhsien county are the last Arcadians. Socialism, as it were, equals Ovid plus electricity. Their sacks of grain bulge like the bellies of good-luck gods. Every bulb of garlic in their fields is the size of a baby's head. Each melon and gourd displays, in its massive and purposeful rotundity, the benefits of collective selfcriticism. Like the bulbous backside of a Cadillac in America 20 years...
...boring reading. Consider this example, on the wood used in ladders in factories and shops: "Knots of less than l˝ inch thick in diameter are permitted on the wide face of portable wooden ladders provided they are at least ˝ inch back from either edge; the slope of the grain in side rails shall not be steeper than 1 in 12 inches..." Not exactly a stairway to paradise. With appropriate illustrations, an OSHA manual instructs farmers how to avoid slipping on cow dung...
...case, Bergland anticipates better times soon. Expecting that export demands from the Soviet Union will grow next year, he expresses "guarded optimism" for grain prices. Indeed, commodity prices have risen slightly during the past two months, and farm prices were the largest contributing factor to the 1.5% increase in wholesale prices during that period-just as militant farmers were trying to drum up support for their strike...
...Soviet purchases should have little, if any, impact, however, on prices at the supermarket. With grain prices so depressed, it would take a huge jump in the farm cost of wheat, for example, to add even 20 or 30 to the price of a loaf of bread. Stung most by the Russians' ploy will be the big grain speculators, who were selling grain futures contracts short this spring and summer in the expectation that prices would fall even lower. The Soviet shortfall changed all that and taught the speculators-as well as Washington officials-a little more about...