Word: transistors
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...impressed with the Red Sox, but also with Kaat. So big and dumb and powerful. The atmosphere was ugly. It was partly our fault. We were committing heresies, electronic sins. The crowd had divided its psychic powers of support between the action and the insidious transistor radios held in weakness close to the mind...
That could mean anything, for as any Asian can testify, the technique of the take has infinite varieties. A stranger at the airport in Vientiane should not be startled if the customs official politely demands a 100-kip "deposit" for the transistor radio in his baggage. In the Philippines, some of the busiest businessmen are the "commuters," people who travel back and forth between Manila and Hong Kong counting on bribed customs officials to let them return with luggage loaded with wristwatches, diamonds or electronic equipment. An applicant for a government contract in New Delhi may find his documents interminably...
...ARVN units are willing to move at night-they fear ambush-and they often recess the war for the weekend while officers whip off to Saigon to see their families or make the bar-hostess rounds. Patrols sometimes play transistor radios on search-and-destroy missions to warn the enemy away. More than one ARVN unit has radioed back to its headquarters that it has taken some key objective when actually it is holed up in a safe spot miles away. And the South Vietnamese are notoriously disrespectful of private property, frequently taking chickens, pigs and other peasant possessions...
...climate. Knives and forks -hitherto forbidden as potentially dangerous weapons-joined spoons on the dining tables; fresh fruit appeared on the breakfast menu; shower rooms were placed at the end of each cell-block tier so that convicts could bathe daily instead of twice a week. Cheap transistor radios were put on sale. For the first time, maximum-security prisoners were allowed outdoors for recreation and supplied with pillows and mattresses instead of back-breaking straw ticks...
...overlooking the capital city of Quito. One recent evening the program became particularly diverting when shrewd parliamentary maneuvering by one of the Deputies forced a clerk to start broadcasting the names of all the delinquent taxpayers in Ecuador. The poor Indians and mestizos of the countryside, listening on their transistor radios, were delighted at the embarrassment of so many rich merchants. President Arosemena, who was also listening in, realized that the names of many of his supporters would be among those mentioned. He placed an urgent call to his friend Levi Castillo and asked him to stop the reading...