Word: soiling
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Nothing is older to man than his struggle for food. From the time the early hunters stalked the mammoths and the first sedentary "farmers" scratched the soil to coax scrawny grain to grow, man has battled hunger. History is replete with his failures. The Bible chronicles one famine after an other; food was in such short supply in ancient Athens that visiting ships had to share their stores with the city; Romans prayed at the threshold of Olympus for food...
Only slightly less serious are the situations in Honduras, Burma, Burundi, Rwanda, the Sudan and Yemen. Additionally, poor harvests threaten food supplies in Nepal, Somalia, Tanzania, Zambia and even the Philippines and Mexico. In Haiti, because of disregard for soil conservation, hundreds of thousands of subsistence farmers face starvation. Whole families are often so hungry that they do not wait for mangoes to ripen; they boil the green fruit...
...IRONWORKERS don't write books. Everyone is very eager for workers to do so, of course. Upper-middle-class writers take "sabbaticals" to soil their hands and find out what it's really like; reporters loiter nervously in bars in Queens waiting for something to be said so they can sneak outside and put it in their notebooks; sociologists write about it from the outside. But except for verbal records like those collected by Studs Terkel, or stuff like Nate Shaw's All God's Dangers, you just can't get no genuine working-class lit in the U.S.A...
...been a mystery. But his Madrid notes set down the method in full detail. He invented a revolutionary system of doing it in one piece, designing special furnaces and bracing systems and winches for it, and even a way of casting it buried upside down in the marshy Milanese soil without cracking the mold. It becomes clear that Leonardo, despite Michelangelo's bitching about his ineptitude as a sculptor, knew exactly how to make the horse and was prevented from executing his plan only because, in the end, he had no bronze: it had all been requisitioned for cannon...
...interesting to hear President Ford's complaints at the United Nations concerning the efforts of the Arab countries to curb oil production in order to hold up the price. Remember a few years ago when a certain wealthy country urged its farmers to put land in the soil bank to curb food production...