Word: spigot
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...vast rural areas are still largely shrouded in the semifeudalism of bygone centuries. Except for the transistor radio and the motorcycle, few of the amenities of modern life have ever arrived. Village women weave their own brightly colored dresses on primitive handmade looms. Water is fetched from a common spigot, and ox carts are still a common mode of rural transportation. A glaringly unequal distribution of wealth and land remains a festering source of political instability...
...have long dreamed of buying a samovar," wrote one frustrated consumer from Stavropol. "How often have I searched in stores with, alas, no results." A resident of Zaporozhye wrote that her stores carried a model for 25 rubles, but added: "It looks like a galvanized bucket with a spigot." Pravda approached the proper ministry for an explanation and printed its response: 28 models were available, and "much is being done to improve their external appearance," said a spokesman, adding that samovars had not been overlooked in the latest Five-Year Plan. By 1985, he predicted, 2 million samovars will...
...indirectly, by reducing the nation's dependence on expensive foreign oil. Instead of leaving conservation to the vagaries of the so-called free market, rationing could immediately reduce oil imports, opening up alternatives in foreign policy to a blind commitment to keep the ever-more-expensive Mideast oil spigot open...
...greedy politicians at lower levels of government rushed to get their share of Abscam's bribe money, the FBI's operation was getting too complex and expensive. The agents had promised to hand over more money in bribes than they could deliver. At some point the spigot had to be turned off. "We found people climbing all over each other to get some of the action," claimed one FBI official. "We were mystified...