Word: rayons
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...Rayon...
Alternative Religion. Join the Hare Krishna movement. To fit in, you need only a pink rayon robe and a long shock of hair on the back of your head, which is not a problem with my baldness pattern. They shave the rest of your head and everyone's happy. A bonus is the swell performance opportunities in front of the Coop on Saturday nights (I want the tambourine) and the "delicious 10-course vegetarian feasts" advertised on the little leaflets they hand...
Dack is short for Dacron. His brothers are Rayon and Orlon. They are among the neighbors Clea finds when she moves to a Vermont village and discovers that this seemingly idyllic countryside is filled with -- gasp! -- polyester. Down at Casa Loretta, they feature Spam burritos and Hawaiian pizza. The local postmistress steams open love letters, the Avon lady writes bad romance novels, and the sheriff makes pronouncements like "If you're not normal in this country, you get put in jail." Such rural New England cliches make Newhart seem like subtle satire, but Alther recycles them with such a tone...
...attend meetings of the Komsomol ((Communist Party youth wing)) Committee to Save Baikal. I learned that in the late 1950s, Orlov, the minister in charge of the paper industry, had ordered construction of a large cellulose complex on the lake's shores to produce a particularly durable viscose rayon cord for airplane tires. It was assumed that the pure Baikal water would facilitate polymerization ((a chemical process in which many small molecules combine to build much larger molecules called polymers)) and the resulting fibers would be stronger...
...plant's output showed that this hypothesis was unfounded. More important, the aviation industry switched from rayon cord to metallic cord. Whatever rationale the Baikal complex may once have had -- and it never offset the potential harm to the lake -- vanished. Construction nevertheless went ahead, with whole armies of officials defending their decision and saving face by insisting on the complex's importance for the defense of the country, the usual clinching argument...