Word: honkings
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...Rome's Capitoline Hill with geese that would signal the approach of the invading Gauls, the Americans have recruited geese for early-warning duty on Saigon's bridges, which are choice targets for Communist demolition teams. The idea is that the cantankerous birds will start to honk madly as soon as someone approaches within 25 feet of their cages. To distinguish them from civilian geese-and to keep them from winding up in Vietnamese cooking pots-the birds have had their feathers dyed purple. Originally, the birds were issued dog tags, but they refused to tolerate them...
...Honk for Service. Whether fancy or plain, the mechanics of most drive-in churches are similar. Ushers distribute printed hymns as the cars roll in, help plug in speakers, take car-to-car collections during the service or request worshipers to place donations in a bin on the way out. Some drive-ins also pass out car-to-car wafers and grape juice for Communion. At many drive-in churches, worshipers roll down their windows and sing hymns together, get out of their cars after services for coffee and doughnuts at the snack bar. Some pastors try to talk briefly...
...this noise about noise seems unnecessarily shrill, considering how much mankind loves the stuff. Italians put Alfa-Romeo horns on Fiats, and sometimes honk until the battery goes dead. Long before the chuffy steam engine, the average town was anything but a hushed haven of peace and quiet; one need only sample the nonstop bell ringing, banging and conversational yelling that still goes on from dawn to dark in any little Spanish fishing village. Men make noise as a way of showing their vitality, and they welcome the noises others make as tokens against loneliness...
Preserving the Place. Back at the L.BJ. ranch for the Thanksgiving holiday, the President took the wheel of his station wagon and, horn a-honk-ing, led a six-car cavalcade of guests and newsmen through herds of frightened cattle, sheep and horses. With Agriculture Secretary Orville Freeman, he hammed it up for photographers by trying to corral a mournful-looking steer...
Educational Honks. The Germans, having established a stable and working democracy, now take their death wish and other peculiar psychological needs out on the highway. Germany still being Germany, there is a hierarchy of cars, so that a Volkswagen has the right to pass a trifling Goggomobil but should never challenge a stately Mercedes. Furthermore, Germans like to play cop to their fellow drivers. Discipline can be instilled, for instance, by an "educational honk" of the horn, and if that is not enough, by a Deutscher Gruss, or German greeting, in which the forehead is tapped with the right index...