Word: standards
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Mount Rushmore. Of recent Presidents, only Truman and Dwight Eisenhower (whom H.S.T. resented) were able to retire from office with their reputations largely intact. Yet Truman never wasted a second polishing his image. He actively campaigned for Adlai Stevenson as the man to succeed him as Democratic standard bearer-but grumbled that the Hamlet-like Illinois Governor "was too busy making up his mind whether he had to go to the bathroom or not." Enemies fared far worse, rhetorically. According to Merle Miller, Truman called Nixon "a shifty-eyed goddam liar," and described General Douglas MacArthur as "a man there...
Though lawmakers have waffled for decades over proposals to switch to the world standard of weights and measures, chances of passing the so-called U.S. metric conversion bill are considered good when Congress reconvenes this week. The legislation would lead to ultimate adoption of the decimal-based system known as SI,* a modernized version of the metric system used by all advanced industrial nations except the U.S. (Canada and Britain are in the process of converting...
...Twenty-five states, the District of Columbia and several territories have developed uniform guidelines for classroom instruction in the use of the metric system. Beginning in the fall of 1976, Illinois schoolchildren from kindergarten through Grade 6 will be taught both the standard English and the metric systems. In Grade 7 and above, the metric system will be used exclusively...
This is all fairly standard stuff; the one element that could have made the difference - a novel, incisive reason for David's fear - is absent. The only secret here is in the title. Some years back, Robert Enrico made a highly regarded short film of Ambrose Bierce's An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge. His new film is turned out with the same sort of spare, elliptical edginess, but it lacks the force of Bierce's classic surprise ending...
Arafat Is Next by Lionel Black (Stein & Day; $7.95) would be a standard assassination entertainment, except that the target is a real political figure: the Palestine Liberation Organization chief. An element of bad taste seems to enter here, as well as bad literary judgment. The literary problem is that since Arafat is in fact not dead and the plot is not cast in the future, the reader knows that the assassination must fail. Frederick Forsyth managed to turn this liability into an asset in The Day of the Jackal. Black fails to do so, and the book's only...