Word: gum
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...remaining calls range from minicrises like gum in the hair and nosebleeds (volunteers have a file of suggested fixes) to unnerving and occasionally terrifying tales of sex and violence. Sometimes the serious and hilarious are combined. Asked by an embarrassed sixth-grade girl to explain what condoms are for, an elderly volunteer answered delicately, "It's something a man wears to protect a lady." Replied the girl: "From what?" On another occasion a little girl asked volunteer Dorie Beaumont, "What if your mom meets your dad at a bar, has drinks and comes home and beats you up?" Beaumont recalls...
...HARDHEARTED MIGHT CALL VANESSA PARADIS France's revenge on us for Euro Disney; she is a model who sings. Having conquered France with her willfully vapid bubble-gum pop, Paradis, 19, has now made her self-titled American debut. For help in her songwriting and backup instrumentals, she chose producer Lenny Kravitz, the irony-free purveyor of heavy-handed homages to late-1960s rock. Together, Paradis and Kravitz make a slick but shallow couple. On cuts like Your Love Has Got a Handle on My Mind, Paradis's slinky, coquettish voice lightens Kravitz's ponderous touch, but even their best...
...what makes Singapore work would hardly succeed in the individualist West. There are hefty penalties, vigorously enforced, on human foibles: littering ($625), failing to flush a public toilet ($94) or eating on the subway ($312). The sale of chewing gum was banned last year, and 514 people were convicted of illegally smoking in public. A drumbeat of official publicity regularly enjoins Singapore Man to be more industrious, more courteous, thinner, healthier. Last year the government attacked his habit of arriving fashionably late at Chinese banquets as "a growing problem with wide implications for national productivity...
...grew up across the street from the student center at the college where my father teachers. I spent a lot of time there--playing video games, buying gum and pencils, riding up and down the elevator, watching TV, and just hanging out. I loved it, and I wasn't even in college...
Recycling is a new frontier for technical innovation. New processes, for instance, are needed to remove contaminants. Sorted solid wastes often include contaminants that gum up recycling systems, such as clear plastic tape on envelopes or sticky yellow Post-its on office paper. A single ceramic cap from a bottle of the Dutch-brewed Grolsch beer can contaminate an entire batch of green glass. "We haven't begun to tap the potential for technical innovation in recycling," says Lloyd Leonard, legislative director for the League of Women Voters...