Word: skunk
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Skunk Works, "a successor to the U-2 takes shape...
...officially called Air Force Plant No. 42, and the factory at the edge of the desert in Palmdale, Calif., is a longish way from the old green-painted hangar in Burbank where it all began. But to everyone in military aviation, it is still the "Skunk Works," after the foul-smelling still where one of Al Capp's Li'I Abner characters brewed Kickapoo Joy Juice. A fitting nickname. Over the years an incredible string of secret weaponry-including the new breed of nearly "invisible" (to radar) planes-has emerged from the Skunk Works...
...though, that made the Skunk Works an air-age legend. When the first U-2s were being built, Chief Designer Clarence ("Kelly") Johnson and his team worked overtime and got whatever they wanted. After he told his old pal Air Force General Jimmy Doolittle, then at the Shell Oil Co., that he needed a fuel that would not boil off at the low pressures of the upper atmosphere, Shell scientists produced a special low-boil, kerosene-type fuel just for Johnson's plane. Inevitably, it became known as Kelly's Lighter Fluid...
...Geologists and biologists believe it will be decades before life comes back to the mountain's highest slopes. Yet lower down, in what looks like a totally forbidding, colorless world, life, incredibly, is returning. Deer tracks have been spotted on otherwise barren slopes; new growths of ferns and skunk cabbage are poking through the ash. Tree sprouts are "coming up beautifully," says John Allen, 72, geology professor emeritus at Portland State University...
...sure I love it," a woman says I in the petulant monotone of the Total Shopper, her eyes two emerald-rimmed pinpoints inside a huge cloud of cherry fox. She is definitely post-mink. Her personality calls for skunk, or perhaps tree sloth (to match her elaborate false fingernails), but she settles on a coat with pelts worked in next year's pattern, a sort of scallop effect resembling a Queen Anne façade. In case she ever sets foot outdoors, she buys a coyote ski jacket. She seems sorry not to have spent more than...