Word: twain
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...Mississippi steamboating," Mark Twain once observed sadly, "was born about 1812; at, the end of 30 years it had grown to mighty proportions; and in less than 30 more it was dead. A strangely short life for so majestic a creature...
Like reports of his own death, Twain's dirge for riverboating turns out to be greatly exaggerated. Today the 29,000 miles of rivers, canals and intracoastal passages that constitute the U.S. Inland Waterways System are churning as never before. While railroads and airlines make more noise fighting one another, the inland waterways' share of U.S. freight traffic has climbed from 3% to almost 10% in the last 15 years. This past year, for the first time in U.S. history, river barges carried more Midwestern grain to export ports than the railroads...
Longer Than the Queen. In many respects, life on the river remains much as it was in the days when Mark Twain leaned out of a filigreed pilothouse to spot his passage. But some things have changed. Nowadays, when rivermen hit New Orleans after the 18-day voyage down from Pittsburgh, they rush to make the quickest turnaround possible with new cargo bound upriver, often leave within a couple of hours...
...forebodings, inland waterways traffic seems sure to grow. The Corps of Engineers is about to spend $1.2 billion to open up a 516-mile stretch of the Arkansas River between the Mississippi and Catoosa, Okla., and is planning to connect the Tennessee and the Warrior-Tombigbee river systems. Mark Twain would be impressed by that one: to cut the connecting channel, the engineers are considering atomic blasting...
Measuring their final profits statements against their yearlong apprehensions, many businessmen at year's end might sigh along with Mark Twain: "I have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened." It was that way in nearly all the world's industrialized nations?a year of growth but not of boom. Western European businessmen, lately accustomed to seeing their economies expand by more than 7% a year, had to content themselves with growth rates that ran as low as 4%. Japan's tycoons cried recession because their nation's expansion rate sank from a spectacular...