Word: tinning
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...known as a "go team" -- left for Detroit from Washington. The NTSB, an independent federal agency, is responsible for investigating all U.S. civil aviation accidents and making recommendations for transportation safety. By dawn the team members were sifting through the wreckage, a painstaking, hands-on activity they call "kicking tin." The investigators, who include electrical engineers, pilots, and engine and airframe mechanics, then formed "working groups." These groups pore over possible factors in the crash: the jet's engines and systems, the quality of air-traffic control, the weather, and the emotional and medical states of the people involved...
...million and is also drawing on funds collected for his last Kansas campaign. Former Delaware Governor Pierre du Pont, though still a distant figure in polls, has pulled in $2.3 million. By contrast, New York State Congressman Jack Kemp has been trying to shuck a reputation as the tin-cup candidate. Though he has collected $3.3 million, much of it comes from direct- mail solicitation, a high-cost technique that helps explain why he had a mere $150,000 balance after allowing for pending bills at the beginning of this month. His campaign is now emphasizing fund-raising methods providing...
Ever since his first novel, The Tin Drum, exploded into international bestsellerdom in 1963, Gunter Grass has pursued two parallel careers. He continued to write fiction (Dog Years, Local Anaesthetic, The Flounder), as well as plays and poetry, that enhanced his worldwide reputation. He also plunged energetically into politics, working on behalf of West Germany's Social Democratic Party, speaking out against the superpower arms race, and hectoring with particular fervor the Western democracies. Planners of literary conferences learned that one sure way to garner attention was to snare Grass as a participant. He could, at the very least...
...narrator is explicitly Grass himself. He alludes to his birth and childhood in Danzig (now Gdansk), his service as a Hitler Cub during his early adolescence, and his later authorial relations to one Oskar Matzerath, the hunchbacked, stunted hero of The Tin Drum. Having asked for and received a pet rat as a Christmas present, the speaker begins suffering nightmares in which he must endure diatribes by "the She-rat of my dreams." She complains of, among many other things, the beastly treatment the rat has had to suffer at the hands of humans, dating all the way back...
This news spurs the narrator first into denial ("No, She-rat, no! . . . We're still alive and kicking") and then into a frenzy of storytelling ("an attempt to put off the end with words"). He resuscitates Oskar of The Tin Drum, now nearing 60 and the head of a film and videocassette production company, and sends him on a trip to Poland to attend his grandmother's 107th birthday party. He revives the plot and premise of The Flounder and sets five women in charge of a sailing barge on the Baltic Sea, ostensibly testing for the stultification of that...