Word: scratch
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Counting Socks. Separated from its only friend in the world, Red China, by 3,000 miles, Albania lives in an isolation both defiant and pathetic. More than 70% of its 1,700,000 people scratch a living from the collectivized soil; most of Albania's farm villages and mountain towns have changed little in the last century. Garbage flows through an open gutter cut in the middle of narrow streets; hawk-nosed men sip Turkish coffee in dim cafés while their women shoulder heavy loads of wood and barrels of scarce water. Along with the traditional poverty...
...Virginia's accounts are godly; she recalls that "Oscar Sargent bet me my whole bag of gumdrops that Miss Nelly McDonnell's cat couldn't scratch himself out if we buried him. I bet he could. But if he could, he didn't. Oscar says to me. he says 'What do people do with dead bodies?' " Still, she is a properly brought up little girl, and she ends every chapter with a prayer. The one that closes the chapter about her garden party (at which the bishop drank a triple julep and she danced...
...wants to kiss you good night in the lobby, you can almost feel all the eyes watching you. It's downright embarrassing." A high point of "lobby observing" (as it is known to the trade) comes when an unwary caller, thinking himself alone, begins to preen and scratch while waiting for the answering buzzer. One tenant regularly warns his caller over the intercom: "Smile, you're on Candid Camera...
...press conference. President Kennedy put in a special plug for the touched-up measure, called it "a strong bill, an effective bill." But most Senators who had originally been opposed to King-Anderson still disliked the substitute. Even so, it may scratch through the Senate. After that, its prospects in the House, congressional leaders calculated, were about the same as King-Anderson's had been: pretty...
...train missileers, the U.S. had to start from scratch-and is only just beginning. The job was given to SAC, which has had to assemble crews and drill into them the sciences of inertial guidance, pneumatics, electronics, hydraulics, cryogenics. After hours and hours of such studies, the trainees are sent on to specialized courses on various missiles (Atlas, Titan, Minuteman), then are assigned to combat crews...