Word: poling
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...government officially maintains that the average Pole spends four hours queuing up each day. That estimate drew derisive laughter from most shoppers. Says one retired woman: "I spend half my time in lines. I do all the shopping for my daughter and her family." Indeed, the elderly are one of the Polish family's most valuable assets, since they have more free time for waiting in line...
Perhaps the most infuriating aspect of the whole maddening charade is that all the hours of queuing do not begin to satisfy the shopper's needs. In the first place, purchases are limited by a strict rationing system that allows the average Pole a monthly allotment of only 6½ Ibs. of meat, 2 Ibs. of sugar, 2 Ibs. of flour, 10 oz. of detergent, twelve packs of cigarettes and a pint of vodka. That, as a gray-haired Warsaw pensioner wryly notes, is "too little to live on and too much to die from...
More affordable to the average Pole are the so-called free markets, which the government traditionally has ignored. These extralegal bazaars are operated as private enterprises by farmers or nimble entrepreneurs who offer abundant quantities of fruits and vegetables at prices slightly higher than the state stores. A free-market egg costs about 40?, for example, compared with 30? for one in a state store. The more wealthy city dweller may drive out into the country and buy meat directly and illegally from a farmer. One Gdansk bureaucrat admits that he and a neighbor buy whole pigs and then salt...
...revoke the TWA pass that she uses to jet wherever her spirit moves her. Kirk, Jeffrey's twin brother, is taking parachute lessons in preparation for a photojournalistic assignment in Antarctica. The world, apparently, is ready to go to war over the natural resources under the South Pole...
Even at night the aluminum sky gleams to every corner. To the south, a light swivels its beam around lonely Alaska, 300 miles north of the Arctic Circle and barely 1,400 miles from the North Pole. Five hundred yards to the north, an iceberg, bleached turquoise by the cold and shaped like a baby's cradle, rocks along. There is no driftwood or trash in the freezing Beaufort Sea. Nature all but forbade man to sail in this place, and Captain Walt Kardonsky knows...