Word: takeoffs
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Culture Clash. Touches of Little Italy and Chinatown. The Beat-era City Lights Bookshop, where Jack Kerouac gave drunken poetry readings, and the Purple Onion, the takeoff nightspot for Phyllis Diller and the Kingston Trio. Iced Campari among jet-setters at Enrico's Sidewalk Cafe, and hamburgers among Oriental teen-agers at Clown Alley. White-shod tourists and Mohawked punks. Saints and sinners bathed in the garish glow of strip joints. This is the cultural clashpoint known as North Beach. Here, on a three-block stretch of Broadway, the barkers compete hoarsely for the business of the leery...
...computer blackout, the new space shuttle Discovery sat perched on its Florida launch pad last Tuesday morning, its nose poked impatiently toward the sky. In a chase plane high above Kennedy Space Center, Astronaut John Young took a last look at the weather and gave the final O.K. for takeoff. The shuttle's on-board computers began the final countdown. "We are go for main-engine ignition," NASA Commentator Mark Hess announced. The engine grumbled noisily, snorting smoke and fire... Six, five, four...
...escalates dramatically. As it turns out, experts who studied high-speed film of Discovery's firing taken right before shutdown believe that something was burning that should not have been. Normally, the liquid hydrogen and liquid oxgygen that combine in the engine nozzles to fuel the shuttle at takeoff produce billows of clean white steam. The film shows reddish-orange streaks in the clouds, a sign of burning plastic...
...members of the presidential peace commission did not know where they were headed when their Bell 212 helicopter took off from Bogotá at dawn. The pilot had been given the top-secret coordinates minutes before takeoff, but not even he was sure of the destination. Suddenly the flag of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (F.A.R.C.), the oldest, largest and bloodiest of the country's numerous antigovernment guerrilla groups, was sighted in the jungle below. This time, however, the flag signified the making of history, not war. In a small clearing in the Alto de la Mesa rain...
Stewardesses are never very soothing anyway. Who are they trying to kid with that little spiel on takeoff about safety exits and all that crap? "In the unlikely event that we have to ditch the aircraft over water, your seat cushion will act as a floatation device." First off, if it's so damn unlikely that we're going to crash, why bother telling us about it? And a floatation device? Great, you're crashing into the water at 600 miles per hour--all you need is a surfboard...