Word: lens
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...brand-new 1962 models, bought in a shiny showroom. The player piano is coming back into its own again to the tune of Moon River and The Peppermint Twist. And, once again, people are clustering around and singing the old favorites as the hyphenated lyrics C'Va-len-cia! In my dreams it always seems I hear you softly call to me .. .") roll past like a speech on a presidential TelePrompTer...
...family and friends conspire to cure him of his vision, and he ends up, like any good little boy, building collective villages out of blocks and playing "Unmask the Kulak." In a thinly disguised satire of Communist Poland, Novelist Stanislaw Len describes the mythical planet of Pinta. Its soil is so arid that the government embarks on a series of irrigation projects...
...land is soon sufficiently irrigated, but the bureaucrats refuse to give up their jobs, and continue irrigating until the entire planet is covered with a few feet of water. "The element which should have been mastered," writes Len, "simply mastered them. Yet no one was prepared to admit it, and the next inevitable step was to declare that everything was as it should be." People struggle through the streets with their heads barely above water; anyone who complains or even gurgles too loudly is thrown into prison...
...signal the "firepower" detachment of regulars hammers the fort with mortar shells and machine-gun fire. From another direction come the Viet Cong assault troops. Blasting a wray through the barbed wire with explosives tied to the end of a pole, they swarm over the rampart screaming "Tien-len [Forward]'" and pour a withering fire into the startled defenders...
Without Good Will. Industries and mail-order stores organized their own makeshift postal services. Unhappiest vic tims by far were a Yorkshire laborer, Len Darnton, and Surrey Garage Hand Gabby Senecal, who both mailed in winning football pool coupons but failed to collect $27.000 and $75,000 because their entries were not delivered in time...