Word: kite
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...around. When I set the hook, it felt like there was an anvil on the other end. Diving and circling the boat, the enormous thing finally came boiling out of the water. Then it tore off for a weed bed and snapped the 20-lb. test line like a kite string. That evening under the oaks I told of my adventure with a "lunker as big as a beer barrel in this special hole in the backwaters." "Where's the hole?" one fisherman asked. "Where?" I just smiled...
...year off before entering college. But the campus, atop a high meadow overlooking the Connecticut River valley, is hard to stay away from. The one dorm constructed so far is coed and co-genus: pets are permitted. Hiking trips substitute for intercollegiate athletics. The college inaugural convocation included a kite-flying festival-and a recent brochure spoofs the lack of campus history by putting photographs of the event in Victorian-style frames. Students are not labeled freshmen, sophomores, juniors or seniors. Instead, they can spend as long as five years taking courses in three "divisions"-the first stressing techniques...
...bill-through higher insurance rates. Changes in society, including the real or imagined decay of moral standards, have also exacted a toll. Insurance executives used to assume that loss claimants were honest; now the presumption is that many people cheat a bit. Greedy motorists and crooked repairmen conspire to kite repair bills and split the dividend. Noting that fire losses have climbed 15% so far this year, one Manhattan insurance broker says: "No one ever loses an old suit in a fire...
...anti-kite law in the District of Columbia seemed a good idea when it was passed in 1892. Washington's utility wires were then strung overhead for kites to tangle in and possibly short-circuit. No one ever thought to repeal the law, although it was not enforced in recent generations...
Washington's Park Police, however, recently have grown almost neurotically literalminded about kites ever since an underground newspaper asked for a permit to stage a kiteflying contest. The Smithsonian Institution was then denied a permit to hold its annual kiteflying carnival on the spacious Mall between the Capitol and Washington Monument. Then when a local lawyer named Frederic Schwartz Jr. filed suit for kite privileges, the Park Police really cracked down. They arrested four kitefliers one weekend and eleven the next, using horses and motor scooters to enforce law and order on the grass. One sergeant leading a miscreant...