Word: spading
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...happens, like some grand exercise in mass therapy, at 10 p.m. on the first Thursday of the month, nine months of the year. As the hour nears, the streets from Mecca to Marrakech grow strangely quiet. Groups of spade-bearded sheiks repair conspiratorially to their salons; workers jam the coffeehouses, and nomads huddle like crapshooters in their tents. As they listen to Um Kalthoum's tremulous voice, old men weep, women writhe on the floor, and the hashish smokers-whose purchases soar to monthly peaks just before the broadcasts-drift into glaze-eyed reverie...
...make a boat faster. He then hung an immense 700 sq. ft. of sail above, counterbalancing it with a deep three-ton fin keel, while keeping the boat's underbelly flat for speed off the wind. Instead of streamlining the rudder into the keel, he stuck a spade-shaped rudder well aft, which gives such strong leverage that a twelve-year-old child has handled a Cal-40 in 40-knot winds. The bold tinkering gives the Cal-40 an almost prohibitively high rating of at least 31.1 for a 40-ft. boat. Theoretically she ought to be five...
...applying Pentagon-style systems analysis to his educational goals, is trying programmed teaching by computer in basic physics and German. He accents interdisciplinary studies, looks forward to a planned integrated medical center with a 300-bed teaching hospital and a 1,000-bed Veterans Administration hospital. His chromium spade for ground-breaking ceremonies will soon be worn thin: 15 big buildings are already UD, and 31 more are to be completed within two years...
...recently rented 300 acres of grassland, simply turned around and put it into the feed grain program's acreage diversion plan, which pays the farmer 62½ for every bushel of corn he does not grow but reasonably might have. Thus, without so much as sinking a spade in his earth, the farmer made a clear profit of more than $8,000. "And, besides," he noted accurately, "I can graze that rented land after October...
Could all this be of value to experts? Most agreed it could. Tournament players usually strive for contracts in the highpoint major suits-hearts and spades-or in no-trump. But hearts is the lowest-ranking of the three, the "danger suit." An opponent can shut out a heart bidder with a spade call at small risk. This, in turn, makes it much more costly for the heart bidder to reach his contract. If he knows his partners heart length, he reduces his risks...