Word: jointed
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...curious watcher of her own slightly out-of-focus life, preserved from the swamps of resentment and depression by mild fatalism and the occasional joint. Episodes are sifted and examined, but not retailed as anecdotes. Some really are conventional stories, or nearly so, with shape and some sort of resolution. Two or three are wholly shapeless, like twelve months out of twelve in the real world. The narrator meets a renowned Indian healer named Rolling Thunder, and nothing happens; then a crazed and menacing religious cultist, and nothing happens again. Even when the narrator's brain- dazed brother, an outlaw...
...their unique qualifications. No, it was not the Miss America pageant. The competitors were vying for the right to house the world's most advanced subatomic particle accelerator, a $4.4 billion project that will bring thousands of jobs and considerable prestige to the state that wins. Last week a joint committee of 21 scientists winnowed down the original 25 contestants to eight finalists: Arizona, Colorado, Illinois, Michigan, New York, North Carolina, Tennessee and Texas...
...failure in the booster-rocket test was unrelated to the malfunction that caused the Challenger explosion on Jan. 28, 1986, when fire burned through an O-ring that sealed the joint between two rocket sections. This time the problem was in a flexible boot ring that helps anchor the swiveling rocket nozzle to the rigid booster case. Nearly half of the ring, which is 8 in. wide, 2 in. thick and 8 ft. in diameter, broke away during the horizontal ground test; some pieces were found inside the booster. The nozzle had been deliberately shifted 7 degrees, just 1 degrees...
...boot ring had been redesigned because an earlier type had eroded on several missions. Morton Thiokol officials said a different type of nozzle joint had been tested successfully in August and could be reinstalled. "We have a parallel design, and we also have some rings of a different configuration on the shelf," said John Thomas, a NASA engineer who began examining the failure. "What we have to do is understand exactly what happened so we can clear this ring or another...
Selling weapons to Iran was bad enough. Using the profits to arm the Nicaraguan contras was an outrage to many members of Congress, which had banned such aid. That transgression became the focal point of the summer-long investigation by a joint congressional committee. Once again, Reagan's statements were contradictory. On several occasions, he denied knowing how the contras obtained their illegal aid. Then he startled listeners by saying of private Nicaraguan funding "I've known what's going on there. As a matter of fact, for quite a long time now, a matter of years...