Word: pit
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1930-1939
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Guard" of the New York Stock Exchange, the members of the Chicago Board of Trade regard themselves as an exclusive club with a divine right not only to deal in grain but also to speculate in it. Just as the Stock Exchange has its SEC, so the Grain Pit has its CEA. But the Commodity Exchange Administration so far has been quite liberal and one of the few limits to speculative activity in grain is a mysterious "gentlemen's agreement" said to have been reached in 1926 by a Kansas city grain merchant named Lonsdale and the then Secretary...
...much (6,000,000 bu.) as there was available for delivery that month. There followed a mad forage for corn by shorts, of whom the biggest was Farmers National. As the price soared to $1.16 a bu., it became apparent that the shorts could not cover and the Chicago Pit was threatened with the worst corn corner in years. Furious, the Board of Trade finally stepped in, told Cargill to sell 1,000,000 bu. in four hours in order to bring its holdings down to the 5,000,000 bu. allowed by the "gentlemen's agreement." Terming this...
Originally planned for the end of this week, the work has been held up because of the rain, which has filled the excavation pit with water, necessitating electric pumps to empty it. The foundations when built will go down 22 feet below the surface, which is an unusual depth for a building of this type. This is due to the fact that the basement will contain two floors of book-stacks...
...Review then told discreetly of an unnamed scientist who decided to pit a modern wetting agent against that anciently proverbial shedder of water-the plumage of a duck. He added a small amount of a wetting agent to a bath, put a duck in the tub. The duck, quickly soaked to the skin, became waterlogged, sank to its neck, floundering ignominiously. Reflecting that the duck might have caught a bothersome chill from this unprecedented experience, the scientist mercifully dispatched it, served it for dinner, with Burgundy and applesauce...
...tone poem Don Quixote, muted wind instruments reproduce with waxwork fidelity the distant bleating of a flock of sheep. In his opera Salome, while the heroine gloats, each chop of the knife that severs the head of John the Baptist clunks with horrifying realism from the orchestra pit.. Composer Strauss once boasted that he could put anything into musical terms, even a glass of water...