Word: pivotal
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...night lights that do not impair vision, the watch is nursing the Blough and her followers down-channel. The Mac leads, softening the brash in the channel and "leaning on the corners," as Gordon Hall puts it. The channels are desperately tight. Ore carriers must have room to pivot around the turns without their bows or sterns straying from the deep water. There is much moving back and forth by the Mac in an effort to flush the ice from the shipping lane, and she shakes like a wet puppy. The "Mackinaw Dance," the crew calls...
...Davis: "Agriculture is now in perpetual revolution, and there is no end in sight." People flying over the West and Midwest see an unusual pattern on the terrain below: not the familiar farm land with checkerboard squares, but large polka dots, the result of costly ($50,000 each) center-pivot irrigation machines that automatically propel themselves around the fields in a circle. Some of the strawberries that Americans buy and eat are cloned. Yes, cloned. The process in brief: plant tissue is mushed up, placed in a clear, jelly-like mix of nutrients and injected with hormones
...bigger acres and make sure that each acre produces more crop." So, besides buying land, he has purchased so much machinery that it requires a football-field-sized yard just to park it. A partial inventory: four 15-ton trucks, three pickup trucks, seven tractors, three center-pivot irrigators and three wheat combines that cost $30,000 each, yet are used only about two weeks a year...
...devices. One of them: a herbicide sprayer with a receiver that catches any spray that does not hit a plant and recycles it into the pump, economizing on spray and preventing pollution of the ground. Another innovation is an irrigation system that covers even more ground than a center-pivot machine; it is a diesel-powered contraption that pushes a boom a half mile long and irrigates 320 acres at a crack...
...magnetic pivot of the evening is Ann Reinking. She is the incarnation of what used to be called the long-stemmed American beauty. Dance seems to be not only her language but also her manifest and incandescent destiny. Ann Reinking isterpsiglorious...