Word: tractorized
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Some people have tried to console me. "Oh, southern accents are cute," they say, or "they're distinguished." My accent is neither cute nor distinguished. It is more likely to be heard at a tractor pull than echoing through the oaken halls of Tara. It hinders me in almost every new venture...
...future Soviet leader was born in 1931 in the fertile Stavropol region of southern Russia, where Yuri Andropov also was born and where Mikhail Suslov, the country's leading ideologist until his death in January 1982, had worked for several years. Gorbachev's first job was driving a tractor. In 1950 he made a significant leap forward by gaining entrance to Moscow State University. Admission is notoriously hard to win; unless a student is exceptionally talented, he needs family influence to enter. The farm boy apparently got his boost from a good work record and from local party officials...
...Ukraine, an investigation into the breakdown of tractors led to the discovery that quality-control experts at a tractor-parts plant were routinely approving defective goods in order to meet (or surpass) production quotas. They thereby became eligible for bonuses, scrolls of honor and other incentives. Most startling of all, one of the suppliers had an officially sanctioned quota for defective merchandise: 5% of production...
...production of Thornton Wilder's Our Town. The summer will see the annual Sinclair Lewis Days road race, beauty pageant and parade. The Sinclair Lewis Eagles Aerie and Auxiliary 3847 are selling popcorn at birthday events, and the Centennial Committee is offering souvenir T shirts, mugs and tractor hats. As Richard Lingeman writes in Small Town America: Lewis certainly would have "appreciated the transubstantiation of his indictment of Main Street into positive thinking...
...brightest star is Grant, 24, whose Age to Age was the first contemporary Christian album to ring up sales of 500,000. At 17 she was touring, accompanying herself on an acoustic guitar; today she and her ten-piece band move around the country in two tractor-trailers, two buses and one truck. She sold out Radio City Music Hall for a concert last year and plans before long to fly as high as those angels she sings about. "I want to play hardball in this business," she says. "I want to be on the same level professionally with performers...