Word: pencilers
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...North Vietnamese bases, government officials and civilians alike waited with a kind of horrible fascination for some sign of things to come. Crews of workers carved up the city's parks, preparing air-raid shelters for 400,000 of Saigon's 1,500,000 residents, while government pencil pushers cranked up a plan to evacuate hundreds of thousands more in the event of an attack...
...DART-THROWER. For the future, the most radical rifle is SPIW (Special Purpose Infantry Weapons, pronounced "spew"), which fires darts instead of bullets. Called flechettes, French for "little arrows," the darts are about as thick as pencil leads and an inch or so long. They have tiny fins or thin tails to make them fly straight, and their needle-sharp points allow them to move through the air like supersonic aircraft with much less drag than short, fat, traditional bullets. Several can be fired from the same cartridge, but Army experts prefer to use one per cartridge and have...
...also best in coming up with offbeat sidebars, finding good material in unobvious quarters. Cartoonist Bill Mauldin, for example, put in some fine moments on CBS sketching the faces of Goldwater and Scranton, making comments on the characters of each as he felt them coming up through his pencil. He showed how Goldwater's glasses make him look better, whereas glasses on Scranton "kill him dead, make him look like an English teacher." CBS also scored what amounted to a news beat when Cronkite was the first to get Governor Scranton to say that he had not read...
...this book. It reads as if it were not written at all but dictated, Napoleon style, at top speed to at least two secretaries at once, and the resulting manuscript corrected with a glass in one hand, a cigar in the other, and no place to hold the blue pencil. Even the title is a piece of mindless sensationalism: Berlin was not a battle, let alone the last...
Back in the '20s and '30s, radio made election nights social occasions. Armed with pencils and ruled-off pads, the group around the set had plenty of time for argument and suspense, listening to the votes pile up. Television took the pencil-and-paper fun out of things by substituting the tote board, accompanied by the Friendly Pundit to explain what the flicking numbers seemed to mean. Now the computer is in danger of spoiling the party altogether by announcing the winners before anyone has time to open a can of beer...