Word: grating
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Surely it is the responsibility of a society as wealthy as ours to ensure that no one has to sleep on a grate. Just as surely, it is the height of unfairness to take away housing funds from the poor while maintaining lavish deductions for middle-and upper-class homeowners. Congress should eliminate this $32 billion dollar handout to the wealthy and use that money to provide adequate housing for the truly needy...
...while our society continues to grope for the social and legislative solutions to the problem of homelessness, each of us individually should still do our part. Yet the question remains, for those of us who are disturbed by the sight of shivering individuals sleeping on a grate or crying out in agony, what can we do when confronted by the homeless beggar...
...good sign: a long queue just inside a hardware store. Obviously, something scarce is available. It turns out to be laundry soap, brown waxy bars that people must grate into washing machines. I join the line, No. 68. "We never used to stand in line for soap," says Alexandra Vasivna, a Moscow pensioner and No. 69. "I don't know what's happened." I hold her place while she sees how much is left. "Nine cartons," she reports. "I don't know if we'll get any." A man in front grumbles, "We would if people didn't hoard...
...comedy. For days after his curate's arrival, Joe goes through an ordeal of embarrassed detective work in search of the key fact he had failed to learn about the young priest: his name. When the curate's trendy seminary pals come to the rectory for a meal, they grate on Joe by questioning the rule of celibacy and saying they wish they could celebrate Mass with a beer mug or a coffee cup. Joe snaps at them: "Life's not a cookout by Brueghel the Elder...
Like neighbors who grate on but cannot escape each other, the U.S. and Mexico know they must get along -- however much one or the other may have to grit its teeth. Rarely, though, have American teeth ground louder than in the case of William Morales, the no-hands terrorist (he blew them off making a bomb). Sentenced to as many as 99 years for a string of bombings, he escaped from the U.S. to Mexico in 1983, was captured in a gun battle and drew an eight-year jail term for killing a Mexican policeman. The U.S. had been dickering...