Word: kites
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...great newspaper is more than a garbage can liner . . . more than a fish wrapper . . . more than a paper doll . . . more than a child's kite...
Meanwhile, office workers have to live with the shock problem. In the higher echelons, where the carpeting is lushest, the shocks are worst. To offset this human storage-battery syndrome, some top brass try grounding themselves with door keys, like Franklin's kite. Juniors are careful to pause on metal thresholds before entering the boss's office, in order to discharge accumulated voltage through their shoe soles. "Maybe," says the office manager of a large Manhattan corporation, "we could all trail chains behind us like gasoline trucks...
...antiquated, obscure laws that are still on the books, you should have noted that at the vanguard of the movement to catch up with the times is Democratic Congressman Frank Thompson Jr. of New Jersey. He is fighting singlehanded for repeal of the 1892 law that forbids kite and balloon flying in the District of Columbia...
Thompson finds the law particularly repressive to Washington politicians, who ought to be able to urge their opponents to "go fly a kite" without being punished for soliciting the commission of a crime. And "what student of political science," asked Thompson in a speech on the floor of the House, "does not know the value of the trial balloon as an instrument of government? Are we now to label all our Chief Executives (not to mention aspirants to that great office) common criminals when they send aloft the name of a prospective Cabinet appointee...
...lavish feast described by Petronius in a fragment of the Satyricon, a penetrating report of social life in the days of Nero. Trimalchio, the host, was a wealthy freedman with more farms "than a kite could flap over," and so many slaves that "not one in ten has ever seen his master...