Word: grips
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Trying to get a grip on its system, NASA set up elaborate reporting channels that produced reams of paper. Quickly the paper became so plentiful that it masked rather than exposed the problems. The Rogers report is expected to detail the extraordinary tale of the now famous O rings, the synthetic-rubber circles, .28 in. thick and 37.5 ft. in circumference, designed to make certain that the superhot gases generated within each solid booster could not escape through the joints of the rocket's segments. When flames did penetrate a rocket joint on Challenger, they ignited the shuttle's external...
...cocaine, the less a crack user cares for food. "You don't eat when you're smoking," says one California addict. Rats supplied with unlimited cocaine will use the drug until they die, ignoring food and water. Such intensely addictive behavior has helped change scientific opinion about cocaine's grip. Says Dr. Jeffrey Rosecan of New York City's Columbia-Presbyter ian Medical Center: "If anyone had doubts as to whether cocaine is physically addicting, all he has to do is look at a couple of crack users...
...contact with the rim, no squaring up to the basket, no firm grip on the ball. No swish...
...radicals," we considered ourselves the conscience of the nation. To us, the Viet Nam War was a moral offense, not a question of politics; we reacted to it primarily in moral, rather than political terms. Somehow, by the strength of our youth, the nation would be wrenched from the grip of death, cleansed, made new. A "movement" without politics or program, we were defined largely by our shared lives on the campus--millions of us getting stoned and listening to the Beatles--and by our opposition to the war. Now that war is over, and we inhabit private worlds...
...twin obstacles in the path of contemporary music are the past and the recent past. In the violin repertoire, the beloved romantic concertos have maintained such an iron grip on audience affections that even indisputable 20th century masterworks have been neglected in favor of the millionth performance of the Beethoven, Brahms or Tchaikovsky concertos. It has not helped that some compositions of the '50s and '60s amounted to teeth-grinding assaults on the instrument that made both soloists and audiences recoil...