Word: omens
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...harmless. Now and then, lightning may blow out radio equipment or burn small holes in aircraft skin sections, but there are no recorded cases of major damage. Discharge of static electricity, named St. Elmo's fire by mariners of the Middle Ages, who thought the phenomenon a good omen from their patron saint, is considered no danger at all. When a plane flies through stormy air, static electricity may build up a force of 300,000 volts, discharging from the craft in a flickering blue halo...
...rain-soaked Eastern Hills of India, the bamboo forests flower only about once in 50 years. And to the wiry little mountain men of the remote Mizo Hills district, the flowering is a dread omen of approaching famine. They believe that the tender shoots and the seeds encourage a vast overbreeding of jungle rats. Once this food supply is exhausted, the rats-many as big as young house cats -assemble and, like a disciplined army, march across paddies and vegetable gardens, eating everything. The broadest and swiftest rivers do not deflect them; as if hypnotized, they plunge into the water...
...barren snowfields are alive with spirits, and their art prints are full of the mythological as well as the real (chief of the mystic artists is old [72], nearly blind Tudlik, the wise man of the Cape Dorset people). The jet-black raven circling overhead is an evil omen; the sea is the home of the mischievous mermaid-like sea goddess Talluliyuk, who lures the seal away from the hunter. And when the aurora borealis flickers overhead, the Eskimos know that the lights come from the dead playing with seal skulls...
Seizing on Buie as a good omen, Knox's crew last week invited him to join their ship. He was, after all, the luckiest swab-by in Uncle Sam's Navy...
...Tenn., home town of Sergeant Alvin York, one of World War I's top heroes, was a little brighter. Teetotaler York, 71, crippled by a stroke in 1954, reported that his health is improving, allowed that he has even felt a yen to go hunting again. Another good omen: he has not heard recently from federal revenooers about the $85,442 income tax they have asked for-a kingsize slice of the royalties York got from his movie biography, produced in 1941. "They claim I owe 'em so much," drawled the old soldier...