Word: spin
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...dropped from a plane to light up a target at night. To extend the time of illumination, parachutes are used to slow the flares' descent. Trouble is the chutes are bulky and heavy. Thus, the light little Frisbee, which is stabilized by its gyroscope-like spin as it sails through the air, seemed like a possible alternative. Properly launched, the Navy researchers reasoned, Frisbees might well serve as a steady descending platform for flares and perhaps other payloads. Some Pentagon sources have suggested that the Navy hoped to load Frisbee-like disks with anti-personnel explosives, which would...
Benton and Newman spin a yarn based on the exploits of the gangs of runaway boys who roamed the western territories in order to flee from the Civil War draft. The two heroes are Drew Dixon, an Ohio boy of sound upbringing, and Jake Rumson, a Pennsylvania wildcat, not only a runaway but a deserter. Jake, contemptuous of all authority and opinion other than his own, leads the gang Drew joins up with. And Drew, for reasons unexplained, becomes his only friend...
...pages of reported contributions. He found nearly 1,400 pages listing donations to one campaign committee for one Senate candidate. "Trying to pin down where the big political money comes from is an Excedrin-size headache," says Iker. "Peering at page after page of microfilmed reports makes your eyeballs spin like a slot machine. Little men with sledgehammers pound away at your temples...
...gods. Barth renders Bellerophon's adventures into a dizzying situation comedy in which metaphors are homogenized and characters recede into their own stories and reappear so that the middle of one man's tale could be another's beginning or ending. Both "Perseid" and "Bellerophoniad" spin on little else than the axis of Barth's cleverness, and both wobble badly...
...speed of the earth's jet streams. Near the surface, however, they clocked winds of only about four m.p.h. Some scientists believe that the winds are stirred up by Venus' rotation, since they seem to blow only in the direction of the planet's spin...