Word: quirks
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What Villeda Morales could not do was pacify the country's bush-league, 5,000-man armed forces. By a quirk in Honduras' constitution, the army rates as a semiautonomous agency, dependent on the Congress for funds, but taking orders only from itself. Villeda Morales first alarmed the soldiers by creating a new civil guard that eventually became a 2,500-man personal army responsible only to the President. The gripes grew louder and finally reached the flash point over the government party's choice of an almost certain successor in the Oct. 13 elections...
...strange sickness is incurable and not fully understood. Through an inborn metabolic quirk, the body produces an excess of porphyrins, chemicals that are usually produced only in tiny amounts and seem somehow to be involved with the body's sensitivity to the sun. In some forms of porphyria, skin sensitivity is slight, but the victim suffers severe abdominal pains, bizarre mental disturbances, and sometimes respiratory paralysis. Mrs. Carlson suffers from a form called porphyria cutaneatarda, in which the porphyrin overproduction can be traced to an inherited liver malfunction. Doctors have studied such cases for years, but have only recently...
...just received my copy of TIME Magazine [June 7], and I couldn't believe my eyes. Is it just a quirk of fate or coincidence that Vol. 81 No. 23 has on its cover Pope John the 23rd, who died...
...contest were held among Detroit's 1964 models, the prize for the styling quirk of the year would probably go to Buick and Oldsmobile. When they tried to put a forward-facing third seat in the rear of their Special and F85 station wagons, the seat wound up perched on top of the rear axle-up so high that there was not headroom enough for a midget. General Motors' solution: raising half of the roof into a vista dome, a move that gives Buick and Oldsmobile the distinction of having the first station wagons styled like a Scenicruiser...
...make mere sodomy seem like sound mental health. Among them are the masochists: those who like to be beaten or stepped on, and those who like to be robbed. There are fetishists who like shoes, and men who dress youngmen up in costumes. There is even one whose pitiful quirk it is to prepare and serve home-cooked meals to naked youngmen...