Word: skittishness
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CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla.: You can understand what John Glenn means when he says -- repeatedly -- that there are more important things to pay attention to on the upcoming shuttle mission than a lowly payload specialist such as himself. For example, Glenn is going to have some skittish houseguests to take care of after Thursday's blastoff: three casefuls of large, brown, southern-style cockroaches. The nose-wrinkling experiment belongs to a Maryland high school, who are paying the bugs' round-trip ticket to discover whether zero gravity throws off cockroach reproductive skills...
That doesn't mean they weren't both trying to help out. To keep tabs on his skittish members, minority leader Gephardt has divided the Democratic caucus into 10 groups and has been meeting with them regularly to help lower the boil. They're all worried, but about different things: freshmen haven't had the chance to bring home pork-barrel projects; members fighting to survive in marginal races are sifting through their polling data trying to figure out which way to go. Safer veterans need to be bridled before any more of them call for Clinton's head...
...exports nothing but dirt-cheap oil and old CCCP hockey jerseys, should have absolutely no impact on the average American wallet. The bad news, of course, is that it's taking your retirement fund to the cleaners -- and it's coming back shrunk. Blame it on the traders, those skittish little folk who, after months of buying like mad (and making you rich) for absolutely no reason, are gazing up gapemouthed at CNBC's clips of W.C. Yeltsin and seeing...
However debatable their effectiveness in practice, concealed-carry laws appeal to citizens grown skittish over lethal violence--if only because measures to restrict access to weapons don't seem to have ended the bloodbaths. Last month the Missouri legislature put a concealed-carry referendum on next April's ballot, and lawmakers in Michigan are scheduled to vote on a similar measure soon. "Carrying a gun does not guarantee you won't get hurt," says Suzanna Gratia Hupp, a Texas legislator who crusaded for her state's law, "but it changes the odds." Many Americans will take them...
...case of life imitating Arthur C. Clarke: A skittish computer malfunctions aboard a manned space station, putting a bid to retrieve a U.S. astronaut in jeopardy. Mir's main computer may not be a HAL 9000, but it has spent the last three days succesfully resisting all puny human attempts to restart it. The malfunctioning mainframe may prevent space shuttle Discovery from picking up the Australian-born Andrew Thomas this Friday, since NASA flight regs prohibit docking without an operational steering system on the other end. Now shuttle managers are meeting to decide whether to abandon Tuesday's launch altogether...