Word: plasticity
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Twelve hundred miles north of the U.S. border, in a land of frozen inlets and howling winds, above the upper reaches of Hudson Bay, is Cape Dorset. Only a cluster of frame houses, snow huts and translucent plastic igloos on the barren southern coast of Baffin Island, it is the trading station for some 320 Eskimos living in scattered three-and four-family camps along the island's frozen coast. It is also the center of the best folk art this side of Africa. Already famed as the most skilled of the Eskimo sculptors, the Cape Dorset people have...
...Boom. Foreshadowed by Leonardo da Vinci in 1508, contact lenses were first made in Europe in the 1880s. They were big, covering most of the sclera (the white of the eye), heavy (made of glass), hard to fit and forbiddingly expensive. Early plastic lenses were also of the big scleral type, had to float on a bath of special wetting fluid, and could be worn only four to five hours at a stretch. Then came the methyl-methacrylate plastics (of the Plexiglas family), the discovery that fluid was unnecessary if lenses had a hole to permit tears to pass beneath...
Vanity & Sport. Grinding the tiny, feather-light plastic lenses is technically so difficult that eye practitioners do not attempt it themselves, leave it to specially equipped laboratories. These labs do not sell directly to the public, so they remain unknown, though Chicago's Plastic Contact Lens Co., the giant in the field, has made more than 4,000,000 pairs in ten years. Average price to ophthalmologists and optometrists: $50 to $60 a pair. After fair charges for examinations, fittings and corrections, the practitioner may collect $150 to $300 from an average patient. Those with special problems must expect...
...provided by a wildly improbable murderer (Glenn Ford), a young Milquetoast who writes and directs TV whodunits, and who takes a potshot one night at a particularly unpleasant blackmailer. When the whodunist sees his first real-life cadaver, he almost faints. When he wraps the body in a plastic tarpaulin, the plastic tears. When he wraps it in a shower curtain and goes to bury it in the fresh foundation of a new gazebo (summerhouse), he discovers that the hole has been filled in by his friendly contractor (John McGiver). At that very moment, in fact, the contractor knocks...
...boaters, there was Triumph's 29-ft. inboard cruiser ($15,990) with a cantilevered aircraft-carrier foredeck and all-electric galley. And for less expensive tastes, Molded Fiber Glass Boat Co. showed a 19-ft. outboard cabin cruiser ($2,800) designed by famed naval architects Gibbs & Cox. Other plastic boats ranged from Sock Boat Corp.'s do-it-yourself runabout ($395), which can be assembled by a novice in 20 hours to the 8-ft. ($325) Dhow midget rowboat. In general, outboards had less chrome, fewer fins, increased storage for gas, paid more attention to passenger comfort...