Word: tinkering
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Peculiar Pattern. Tornado clouds are unpleasant subjects to study at close range, and so they are not completely understood. But practical information about them has accumulated. In 1948. Meteorologists Ernest J. Fawbush and Robert C. Miller were on duty at Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma, when a tornado swept across it. After the disaster they went over their data on conditions before the storm and found a "peculiar pattern." Five days later they came to their office, took a look at the day's charts and saw the same weather pattern. They did not dare use the dread...
British Champion Stirling Moss, driving a Mercedes-Benz, stopped to tinker with his fuel pump, was promptly grabbed by a couple of athletic male nurses, shoved onto a stretcher and carted off to an ambulance. "I'm O.K.," Moss protested. "Be quiet, boy," said his Spanish-speaking nurses, who could not understand him. Moss got a quick cooling-off with ice packs before he finally escaped back...
...critical barrage went on in private as well as in public. At cocktail parties Tinker was needled mercilessly by Canadians who seemed to feel that they were entitled to hold him personally responsible for McCarthyism, U.S. foreign policy, and "every bit of claptrap put out by Hollywood, U.S. Steel or the C.I.O...
...Tinker's article drew more mail than anything Maclean's has published in years. Surprisingly, half the letters agreed with Tinker in deploring the growth of such carping anti-Americanism. More support for Tinker came last week in a guest editorial written for Maclean's by Author Hugh (The Precipice) MacLennan. "Mr. Tinker has hit nearly all of us where it hurts," MacLennan wrote. "We're chagrined and a little ashamed of ourselves...
MacLennan's urbane explanation for Canadians' behavior toward Tinker and for the American's wounded reaction is that both Canada and the U.S. are suffering from neuroses: the Canadian neurosis is a compulsive desire to be noticed and the American neurosis is a compulsive desire to be liked. Thus, self-conscious Canadians belittle and criticize the U.S. in order to build up their own national ego. And Americans, expecting friendship, are hypersensitive to the needling. Only mutual understanding, MacLennan believes, will resolve the problem: "The Canadian and American national neuroses will continue to howl at one another...