Word: sputters
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South Central is best understood with eyes closed, because then unnerving sounds eclipse the familiar Los Angeles sights. Police and ambulance sirens, the insistent sputter of hovering police helicopters, blaring car alarms, the rapid pop-pop that no resident mistakes for a car backfiring -- all blend together into an incessant white noise of menace...
...seems that almost no news is good news for Moscow's leadership these days. The Soviet economy continues to sputter; ethnic tensions are flaring; independence movements are gaining force; Communist regimes are collapsing all over; and the Soviet population is increasingly disgruntled. Surprisingly, some of the fullest, frankest reporting of these events has come from none other than TASS, the official Soviet news agency and long an uncritical government mouthpiece. In a report from Lithuania last month, for example, TASS cited a description of that republic's "1940 joining of the Soviet Union as a 'violation by outside force...
Instead, a department will typically sputter along, only tenuring traditional, established scholars who conform to some arbitrary standard of "excellence." Meanwhile, more daring departments at other schools will race ahead...
...flaky Duraplast body redesigned since the first mass-production models rolled off the assembly line in 1964. Its motorcycle- size two-stroke engine coughs out more pollution than almost any other auto. Often the motor's two cylinders come on line one at a time until they sputter in unison in a puff of blue smoke, sounding uncannily like an ancient sewing machine...
...first day, 250 city blocks were incinerated. Not until the third day did the last of the fires sputter down. By then 514 city blocks (4.1 sq. mi.) had gone, 28,188 buildings, including the homes of 250,000. Libraries, theaters, restaurants, courts, jails, the financial district, South of Market, the fabulous Palace -- all gone. North of Market, little remained of Chinatown but a labyrinth of underground chambers once home to brothels and opium dens. About 2,500 had died...