Word: instrument
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...bustle of a wartime staff room. Poring over charts and maps, officials plot their strategy, barking orders into a battery of phones. On the seas and in the skies, the enemy is tracked by an armada of instrument-laden ships, balloons and buoys, aircraft and weather satellites that feeds intelligence into a support force of computers. But this is a bloodless war. The only object is to study the foe: Asia's mighty monsoon, the great seasonal winds that annually bring life or death to hundreds of millions of people...
...overriding ambition was to rid China of all traces of its decadent past, while at the same time transforming the Chinese national character. His instrument was a vast totalitarian party and police apparatus that reaches into every facet of daily life, that controls what a Chinese can read, where he can travel, how he should live. Despite the omnipresence of this Orwellian machinery, many practices of the feudal past are observed. In the privacy of their homes, there are many peasant families who still pray to Kuan-yin, the goddess of mercy, and burn incense to their ancestors. Ouija boards...
...right hands, English is a precision instrument. And, like all such devices, it is alternately blunted and sharpened by its users. In 1978, many nicks and abrasions came from Washington. Ernest Boyer, U.S. Commissioner of Education, admitted that he had been faking it: he actually pretended to understand memos. The confession was prompted by logorrhea in his own department: "This office's activities during the year were primarily continuing their primary functions of education of the people to acquaint them of their needs, problems and alternate problem solutions, in order that they can make wise decisions in planning...
...palace (his father is an accomplished cellist and his mother plays the piano and harp), Hiro is devoted to music. When he joined the Gakushuin orchestra, he put aside the violin he had played since kindergarten and switched to the viola. By performing with a lower register instrument, says the prince, he can better hear his fellow musicians...
According to Texas rules, all candidates for the twirling line must be at least sophomores and able to play a musical instrument well enough to make the school band. At Huntsville that in itself is serious business, because it means dealing with Richard Wuensche, 36, the intense, bespectacled perfectionist who directs the band. Wuensche (rhymes with clinchy) is known as The Chief, and the 175 members of the Huntsville marching band are Wuensche's Wonders. For eight years they have won the Division One rating for high school bands in Class AAA (schools with 625 to 1,300 students...