Word: midflight
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Model planes go catatonic in midflight. Automatic garage doors open mysteriously in the night. Truckers' chatter interrupts ministers' sermons over church public address systems. Traffic lights go berserk. TV pictures flutter. And a solid-state sewing machine suddenly shouts to a startled Indiana housewife the password of the invading force, "Breaker! Breaker!" These strange goings-on are caused not by UFOs or other extraterrestrial goblins, but by RFI (radio frequency interference), an electronic epidemic spread by the nation's 15 million Citizens Band radios (TIME...
...media treat with cyn icism or derision anything they cannot comprehend"). Since no information broadcast or printed is worth knowing, he says, people should simply ignore journalism. They will learn of really important matters through other means - conversation, literature, deduction, he suggests. Then Harris switches hyper bole in midflight, arguing that the press's preoccupation with Watergate caused it to ignore more important problems, such as starvation in some parts of the world...
Editorially, all sorts of ideas were considered for transforming LIFE into something else. But the example of the Saturday Evening Post's disastrous metamorphoses was too close. As Donovan put it last week, such transformations "in midflight" are nearly always impossible; still, "really exciting ideas for something that LIFE might have changed itself into may still be very exciting ideas for a new magazine...
...deep-space abort"?turning the spacecraft around before it reached the moon and sending it back to earth?was obviously beyond the power of the lunar module's small descent engine. Odyssey's big propulsion engine, in the service module, was powerful enough to turn Apollo in midflight, but Houston was reluctant to try using it. Controllers were concerned that the engine might have been damaged by the accident. If it didn't work, Apollo's limited electrical power would be wasted in the firing attempt...
...Conway Show, which premieres on CBS this week, is also a witless formula sitcom, starring the ex-McHale's Navyman as pilot of a broken-down, one-plane airline. In the first episode, Conway gets locked out of the cockpit in midflight. Hilarious...