Word: rubes
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Sponsors of the tax cuts intend them to help balance the federal budget, but leading Democrats called the plan "a Rube Goldberg scheme" that would cripple Congress's economic policy-making powers...
...folklore of the British land Emerald isles, though they note that nearly every culture has its appropriate Third World of mischievous wee folk. A Celtic bumpkin can be enticed by his loccal wood spirits into a jigathon that makes years seem like minutes. In America, a Catskill rube glike Rip Van Winkle loses himself in the revels of a dwarf bowling league...
...brew crew spends its days monitoring the spigots of a miniature brewery that looms like some Rube Goldberg creation in their Cruess Hall lab. After breaking down 20 commercial beers chemically, the students then create their own original product. Fruits of this term's efforts: a barley wine, a dark German-type beer and a low-carbohydrate model. But both state laws and college custom decree that all potions be discarded after taste tests. "Sentence one, day one: there will be no abuses," says Microbiologist Michael Lewis, a ruddy-faced Welshman who has taught the course since...
...negotiations have become affairs of Rube Goldberg complexity. Washington now talks to territorial representatives (including ones from the Marshalls and Palau) as if they were still a united entity. At the same table, U.S. officials negotiate with the two dissident groups as if their separate-but-equal bargaining status were achieved. What all the Micronesians agree upon is that they want to remain associated with the U.S. but gain greater control over their own local governments. More independence, more discriminating federal subsidy, is long overdue in beautiful but troubled Micronesia. Given Jimmy Carter's determination, both may arrive soon...
...familiar Polaroid camera. Occupying an otherwise empty room at the museum, the camera is in effect a room within a room, a light-tight box 3.6 meters (12 ft.) wide, 3.6 meters high and 4.8 meters (16 ft.) deep. In addition to a large conventional lens, it contains a Rube Goldbergian arrangement of pulleys, ropes and rollers. While conventional Polaroid cameras are operated from the outside, the three technicians who work Land's invention position themselves inside...