Word: harmless
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...used in any car with a low-compression engine not requiring the antiknock properties of leaded gas. But it will be indispensable in all but a few 1975-model cars. The great majority of those cars will be fitted with catalytic converters that change noxious exhaust fumes to harmless gases. The lead in ordinary gasoline fouls the converters. Indeed, as little as two tanks of leaded gas will "poison" a converter; to replace it could cost the motorist up to $150. So automakers will equip their 1975 models with smaller-than-usual filler pipes leading into the gas tanks. Conventional...
...York Dolls. Occasionally a glitter singer like England's bisexual David Bowie is actually good. Mostly, though, admits the Dolls' David Johansen, "the whole glitter trip is just jive." A concert can also be simply an excuse for youngsters to come out for a reasonably harmless masquerade party. The kids go on parade to show off their white tuxedos and top hats, feather boas, and of course glitter, lavishly applied to face and body...
Most of the Asiatic folk medicines sold in San Francisco's Chinatown are harmless. Sliced deer horn and powdered tiger penis, which believers in mystical medicine take to increase virility, are unlikely to hurt anything but the buyer's pocketbook. Neither are any of the 58 listed ingredients of another Chinatown favorite for aches and pains: ginseng rejuvenating pills, which are made in Hong Kong and contain such exotica as male mouse droppings, silkworm, rhinoceros horn, amber, turtle shell and myrrh. But this ancient Oriental panacea also contains an unlisted substance: the powerful Western painkiller phenylbutazone, a drug...
...Wampeters," by the way, are objects (like the Holy Grail) around which the lives of otherwise unrelated people revolve. "Foma" are "harmless untruths, intended to comfort simple souls,"-such as "prosperity is just around the corner." A "granfalloon" is a "proud and meaningless association of human beings." As members of the Vonnegut granfalloon know, the words first appeared in one of Uncle Kurt's early novels, Cat's Cradle. · John Skow
...That Vice President Ford is "a politician who projects complete sincerity" [Feb. 25] seems a harmless enough statement to me, but I think it somewhat blindly contributes to overlooking other characteristics of Mr. Ford's that may finally add up to be more pertinent...