Word: gum
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...cards, but there is a vital difference: a tiny chip that can electronically store money. A consumer first takes the card to an ATM and downloads, say, $100 onto the chip. When the card is inserted into a terminal, the chip deducts the price of a newspaper or chewing gum from the total stored on the card and adds it to the virtual cash stored in the terminal. At the end of the day, the merchant electronically transfers all the money stored in the terminal into his establishment's bank account...
...disorder, for example, probably arises in the striatum, a part of the brain that controls voluntary movements. Princeton's Jacobs believes that, based on experiments with cats, repetitive motor activity--walking, chewing, breathing--stimulates the release of serotonin, which improves mood. That might explain why people are soothed by gum chewing and why obsessive-compulsives perform such ritualistic acts as hand washing over and over; they may simply be self-medicating to overcome a serotonin deficit...
...celebs in the world, whose image is protected most fiercely? Barbie's. Now ever vigilant Mattel, which makes the toy, is suing MCA records for trademark infringement over Barbie Girl, a bubble-gum dance song by the Danish band Aqua. It doesn't help that the song has lyrics like "You can brush my hair/ Undress me everywhere...
...middle-class and upper-middle-class homes the following scenario is played out daily. Wife and Husband have decided to buy a new family car, their last one having been rendered immobile by the accumulated weight of gum wads, empty juice boxes and broken plastic toys from McDonald's Happy Meals. Do they go with the stolid minivan or the racy sport-ute? They consult consumer guides. They compare prices. They make, if they have the stomach for it, a few desultory visits to a variety of reptilian car salesmen. And they gather promotional brochures...
Early in this century, the humorist Stephen Leacock said the American innocent must prove his folksy virtue by being semi-inarticulate, mouthing things like "Heck, b'gosh, b'gum, yuck, yuck." That is why Jimmy Stewart's hesitating-gulpy delivery was reassuring. His appeal went so deep because it touched America's belief in its own simplicity. When Mark Twain wanted to present himself as a traveling American, he called his tourist book The Innocents Abroad...