Word: paraffined
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...schools teach the three Rs these days, the sophomore class of Washington's Coulee Dam High School challenged the grown-ups to an old-fashioned spelling bee. Last week, for 20 minutes, the grown-ups did their best, but they missed embarrassment, flubbed efficiency, collapsed on laboratory and paraffin. Final score: victory for the sophomores...
...tore on, paused before the English-language Iraq Times, and rolled paraffin under the steel doors (the Reds came well prepared), setting it afire. An automatic weapon chattered at the rioters from atop the police station. The mob, roaring like a wounded beast, rolled massively to the police station, set it in flames, tore apart three policemen as they scuttled out, and beheaded one of the bodies. A comparative handful of Reds, commanding an army of malcontents, had all but taken over ancient Baghdad, a city...
There experts cleansed the napping, hissing birds with a carefully blended mixture of soap and paraffin, taking great care not to destroy the natural oil in their feathers ("without it they would become waterlogged and sink"). Also used in the operation: brushes, sponges, sandpaper and a vacuum cleaner...
...Thenceforth, Magician Rinn fervently practiced what he and most of his fellow magicians insistently preached: that no "spirit manifestation" existed that they could not duplicate by plain trickery. They showed how clammy "spirit hands" (that brushed the brows of spectators at dark séances) were concocted out of paraffin or simply from "a kid glove filled with wet sawdust . . . kept on ice." One piece of so-called "ectoplasm" ("ectopiffle would be a better name," remarked a surly magician) proved to be a chunk of animal lung. The only "spirit body" that Rinn failed to duplicate was that...
...Immortal Lovers wipes the paraffin smirk off their faces. As in her past performances (lives of Byron, Shelley, Keats, Oscar Wilde, George Sand, et al.), Biographer Winwar makes the facts highly readable. The true love story of the Brownings is just as exciting as the semi-fictional versions of it, and far more warmly human...