Word: odd
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...odd thing was that a mere change in the weather-an unexpected late-September hot spell-could bring one of the world's largest electric systems so close to total blowout. Public utility companies, which have encouraged customers to buy more appliances to consume more power, now plead that they must build more power plants to meet the increased need. Conservationists stress that more power plants will increasingly foul the already poisonous air. Partly because of the bad city air, architects design buildings with windows permanently closed. Thus massive air-conditioning systems must dangerously draw ever heavier loads...
...DAYS before the Harvard appearance, Styron telephoned to relate a disturbing experience at Yale: 80-odd blacks had greeted his talk there with invectives and wild hooting, a thing he had grown to expect since publication of his controversial The Confessions of Nat Turner. Black attacks on that book were painful in the extreme to Styron, who had given it seven years in the writing (and twenty years of thought) only to be accused of classic black emasculation. I assured him that such would not be the Harvard case: the audience would be racially mixed, and while he might anticipate...
...underground" programs superimposed on the official slate meant that we suffered perhaps 80-odd speakers where half that number might have better served. Probably we could have done without contributions made by the circulation manager for a Boston tabloid, the biologist who touted a miracle bug-killer (in which, it developed, he held some proprietary interest), the Time-Life poobah who saw no First Amendment dangers in newsmen being required to surrender their notes or tapes to Big Brother's agents in Washington, or the faculty-tie who severely lobbied in behalf of Foundations remaining untaxed despite those many abuses...
Jesus, I thought. You mean that this woman has lived 60-odd years thinking that her presence in rooms causes the ceilings to leak...
Before he died in 1963 at the age of 79, Williams had treated, by his own count, a million and a half patients and delivered 2,000 babies, while delivering himself of 49 books. These included his five-volume industrial-age epic poem Paterson-along with 600-odd other poems, 52 short stories, four novels, four full-length plays and a brilliant, curiously neglected impression of American history (In the American Grain), not to mention an opera libretto and the translation of a medieval Spanish novel...