Word: humps
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When Mauritania won its independence in 1960, sovereignty and sand were about all it had. Sprawled across the lower Sahara on Africa's Atlantic hump, the arid nation is twice the size of France but has only 800,000 people and an average per-capita income of less than $80 yearly. Nonetheless, since 1956 Morocco has been struggling to annex "the stolen sands of Mauritania," which it claims were illegally taken from colonial Morocco by French Army surveyors. Under the late King Mohammed V, a "Moroccan Liberation Army" even tried to "free" Mauritania; with support from Russia, Morocco managed...
...biology department; his wife Honey (Melinda Dillon) is four years younger. At first they are onlookers, but before long they find themselves sucked into the vortex of a maelstrom. The fun refuses to remain innocent, and the games become deadly: in turn they play Humiliate the Host, then Hump the process more liquor than does the entire assemblage at the "Libiamo" party in La Traviata...
...Aksai Chin plateau, empty of nearly everything but rocks, sky and silence. For centuries, a caravan route wound through the Aksai Chin (one reason the Chinese say the plateau is theirs is that Aksai Chin means "China's Desert of White Stone"), leading from Tibet around the hump of the lofty Kunlun range to the Chinese province of Sinkiang. In 1956 and 1957 the Chinese built a paved road over the caravan trail, and so lightly did Indian border police patrol the area that New Delhi did not learn about the road until two years after it was built...
...addict can buy extra-thin tape capable of cramming eight hours of monaural sound onto one tape reel-all of Beethoven's nine symphonies plus his five piano concertos. For his car he can buy "magic memory" machines designed to fit over the transmission hump and record his dictation en route or music received on the car radio. There are devices on which six people can listen simultaneously to the 1812 Overture on six different earphones at six different volumes; there are "perpetual motion" tape machines that, once started, spew forth repetitious music endlessly...
Weedy Neurosis. The source of Howells' crippling tameness is more complex than his frequently cited refusal to write about sex (no American could write about sex in those days of rump-hump squeam-ishness). Howells simply could not write, and preferred not to think, about the darker sides of human nature. Much as he admired Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, the realities they wrote of were to him merely Russian realities; it would be impossible to write a Russian novel in the U.S., he wrote, because here life took on a more "smiling aspect." Biographer Edwin H. Cady presents evidence that...