Word: kiting
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...early 1948 concluded that the Chinese Communists were genuine Marxists and not merely "agrarian reformers," warned that only active U.S. intervention could save the Kuomintang, but still held out hope that the Chinese Reds would in the long run refuse to be merely "a tail to the Russian kite"; of a heart attack; in White Plains...
...kite was tangled in the power line behind his home outside Houston, and the impatient youngster tried to unsnarl the mess by poking at it with a rake. Zap, crackle, pop. The line short-circuited, burned through and fell, sparking and whipping, onto a chain link fence. That was a job for Superman -but he didn't show. Fortunately another stellar hero lived next door, and Scott Carpenter, 38, came to the rescue. While a second neighbor held the wires down with a board, the astronaut laid into the 120-volt cable with a wooden-handled ax, soon...
...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...
...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...