Word: pluckings
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Sometimes the thieves' ingenuity has been almost as quaint as their plunder. It has been reported that in several cases they hired helicopters to pluck their booty from the roofs of houses and barns. Robert Eldred of Dennis, Mass., returned from a trip to find that his square-rigger ship vane had vanished. Six months later, it was traced with the help of an antique dealer to a banker's house in Florida. Eldred flew to Florida and, taking two extra seats in the plane, returned home with his antique. Before Eldred had time to remount the weather...
...amorous intent, says British Zoologist H.C. Bennet-Clark. In fact, they make their burrows in the shape of double-horned acoustic amplifiers to concentrate and focus their siren sounds for maximum effect in attracting females. They produce the noise by rubbing a toothed vein on one forewing with a pluck on the other. University of Florida Entomologist Thomas J. Walker explains that male field crickets produce three identifiable songs: one to hail a likely lover, another to beguile one already enthralled, and a third to warn off a potential rival. The kind of sound a cricket makes depends...
...JUST A FEW weeks ago Joan Baez looked back through time to pluck an anecdote from her repertoire. She had called a press conference to plug an about-to-be-released documentary film about the trials and tribulations the Harris' (Joan and her husband David) had faced in the past year. One reporter had asked her, "Has your husband ever really been followed by government agents?" Her head was quick to nod "yes" and she said "David once had a brown Pontiac following him everywhere. Finally, when we were out in the desert. David stopped, got out, and went back...
Before he left the capital, however, Nixon had to pluck a couple of unavoidable legislative nettles. One of them was more than garden variety: renewal of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which came to his desk for signature with a provision for votes for 18-year-olds firmly attached. Despite reservations, Nixon put his name to the measure largely to avoid offending blacks, who consider the voting-rights extension vital. "We never had the blacks with us," an aide explained, "but the President is trying now to get across the idea that he is not their enemy...
...proves that the black vote is still ineffectual in the South. Yet few astute Southern politicians would be willing to gamble their own careers on that proposition. In Alabama last week, the black vote was so strong that the most skilled racial demagogue of the day had to pluck all of his fear-strumming oratorical strings to overcome it. And he succeeded by only a narrow margin. What the election really proved was that blacks alone control no state, but that even when facing a Wallace, they now constitute a factor that must be carefully calculated in most Southern elections...