Word: soiling
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...spectrum of our lives. The Boston Globe gave the impression that 888's inhabitants were foul-mouthed harpies who were accosting straight women. There was no mention of the vitality or life of the place. The women inside were just not us, and we were a little afraid to soil our hands with building takeovers and demands...
...theme. The threatened institutions ostensibly serve so crucial a function that citizens must endure IRS fishing expeditions into their pockets to finance them. Harvard has a holy mission to churn out graduate students, the better to enlighten dark corners of the nation; farmers must preserve the virginity of their soil, and the SACB must root out subversives who jeopardize national security--all paid for, to greater or lesser degree, with tax money...
...prices. But like any other set of rules that artificially tether free markets for a long time, Washington's agricultural policy has promoted distortions. Western farmers, for example, have been paid by the Government to irrigate formerly unusable land that the very next year was placed in a soil conservation program and thus, for still a further price, was held out of production. Subsidies to milk producers are paid on the basis of the butterfat content in their cows' milk, which naturally has encouraged dairy farmers to produce, through the breeding and feeding of cattle, ever richer milk...
...Apollo 17 Astronaut Harrison Schmitt poked around a lunar crater last December, he suddenly shouted, "Hey, there is orange soil! It's all over!" Schmitt's excitement was shared by scientists back on earth. Because the soil looked remarkably fresh and the crater resembled volcanic vents on earth, they speculated that volcanic activity might well have occurred on the moon as recently as 200,000 or 300,000 years ago. That would have upset the widely held view that the moon has been largely dormant for more than 3 billion years. Said NASA Geochemist Robin Brett...
Last week the highly publicized orange soil produced some unexpected disappointment. Using "atomic clock" dating techniques. Dr. Oliver Schaeffer and his lunar-analysis team at the State University of New York at Stony Brook determined that the material was 3.71 billion years old, within the age range of other moon samples that have been brought back to earth. How could scientists have been so far off the mark in their first estimates? Conceding that it was all a "big surprise," Schaeffer theorized that the long-buried soil might have been dug up recently by a meteoroid impact, thus giving...