Word: ran
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...hundred million citizens will be cooing at the Statue of Liberty and popping Chinese firecrackers like machine guns far away. Another Fourth. Can anyone say why, exactly, we think we're something special? After all, the Chinese made more than firecrackers, and the Greeks and the Romans ran the world once too (not that we really do). In a heavenly accounting, those civilizations could provide a hefty list of what they offered to the world. If St. Peter asked Americans what they have offered, what would we say? Do car phones count...
Even the mastermind recalled it as "Black Sunday." Everything went wrong. The glut of visitors turned the Santa Ana Freeway into a seven-mile parking lot. Refreshment stands ran out of food and drink for the nearly 30,000 invited guests and thousands more ticket counterfeiters who stormed the gates. Rides broke down almost immediately. A gas leak forced the shuttering of Fantasyland. The day's corrosive heat sent women's spiked heels sinking into the asphalt on Main Street. Nor was this a debacle to be covered over with Tinker Bell dust; the whole sorry spectacle was broadcast...
When deposed Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos, his wife Imelda and 88 members of their entourage abandoned their palace in Manila and Imelda's 3,000 pairs of shoes last February, they braced for some cutbacks in their conspicuous consumption. But, in fact, in one month the exiled Marcos & Co. ran up personal expenses of $207,000 on U.S. bases in Guam and Hawaii, says a House Armed Services subcommittee. That bought, among other items, $2,552 worth of shoes, which were not for Imelda but for others in the party. Other tabs: $19,971 for long-distance calls...
Within days the mechanical problem was located: a joint on one of Challenger's two solid rocket boosters had failed. But the root cause of the tragedy ran deeper. A presidential commission, headed by former Secretary of State William Rogers, discovered NASA itself was deeply flawed. Far from representing the best of American know-how, the twelve-member commission found, NASA had become a bureaucracy that had lost its way. Before the first shuttle was launched, the agency had known of the fatal seal problem but had buried it under a blizzard of paper while permitting schedule-conscious managers...
Conversely, top officials should take the initiative to raise questions orally and directly, rather than sending paper inquiries down through the ranks. Oldtimers at NASA yearn for a return to the days when Air Force Lieut. General James Abrahamson, now Reagan's director of the Strategic Defense Initiative, ran the shuttle program. When he sensed a problem, he awaited no "criticality" rating; he barged into the office of even the lowliest technician to ask how to fix it. Perhaps unfairly, one commissioner insists that "Abe was replaced by wimps...