Word: sirens
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...ridiculous, but it was strong enough to survive many storms. Social critics might, and regularly did damn the high-powered car as a strangler of cities, fouler of the air and catalyst of a blighted landscape of junkyards, filling stations and hotdog stands. Foreigners might tempt with siren songs of durability and economy, and lure no small number of Americans into dalliance with a Volkswagen or Toyota. Even the average driver in the last decade or so might grumble at his beloved during a traffic jam or on the day that the insurance premium came due; he might actually feel...
...little slide projector filled with schematic diagrams of the utility systems used throughout the University. When something goes wrong, all the attendant on duty has to do is to push a specially coded number into the computer's logic system and the diagram pops onto a television sized siren that sits next to the computer console. Without leaving his seat, he can see what's wrong...
...release: there are no orgasms to let off the steam, and the violence lashes out like a lizard's tongue--it never changes anything, and the high tension prays relentlessly on an audience. The bursts of voltage are supplied by the setting: a needle in an arm, a siren, a scream, a Fat City sequence of a man waking alone ringing with hangover and dreams burning off fast, shrill urban music--devices like these make up for hours of narrative padding or careful ambience-building. It's a modern movie language...
...sexual code--in the expertise of how to win a man and keep him, how to flatter and flirt and sell their wiles. We disguised the jagged edges of our personalities to pander to the male appetite, and we sacrificed any principle for male applause. Trying to be siren seductresses was our assent to passivity and receptivity and all that men had laid down the definition of women to be. We gave up claim to doing what we were educated to need...
...earn every penny of their scarcely extravagant salaries. So do the vast majority of the unsung bureaucrats and local officials. In the past dozen years, only a handful of Senators and Congressmen have been accused-let alone convicted-of corruption or outright crimes. Given the parade of temptations, the siren appeals of lobbyists and special interests, it is a wonder not that so many of them are "doing...