Word: vapor
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...emaciated like her husband, had her own bogeymen?strangers with X-ray vision outside the draped bedroom window?and she hid from them in the closet. The couple's paranoia was fleetingly sliced away, of course, as soon as they got high: they "free-based," breathing a distilled cocaine vapor, Phil alone all night with his glass water pipe and thimble of coke, Rita in another room with hers. In the mornings, Phil and Rita got back together, down on all fours, scratching and picking at the carpet for any stray grains of coke...
...current problem is directly traceable to the burning of fossil fuels by power plants, factories and smelting operations and, to a lesser extent, auto emissions. When tall smokestacks vent their fumes, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides and traces of such toxic metals as mercury and cadmium mix with water vapor in the atmosphere. Chemical reactions follow that form dilute solutions of nitric and sulfuric acids-acid rain...
DIED. Joyce C. Hall, 91, founding father and president (1910-66) of Hallmark Cards, who cared enough to build the very best company of its kind; in Leawood, Kans. Hall's inspirations, "flavored with the vapor of past experience," created a business that now makes about 8 million cards daily, and $1 billion each year. Through exhaustive market research (which counseled against using peacocks, geraniums and the word mighty), he changed much of his line each year, inspecting each card himself and paternalistically overseeing the welfare of his employees. A civic-minded booster of his beloved Kansas City...
...thick, gooey carpet of tar that washes up daily. Says County Supervisor William Wallace: "If your dog got loose and went down to the beach, it would take you an hour to clean his feet." Still worse, the putrid smell of hydrogen sulfide often hangs over the area like vapor from a truckload of rotten eggs. The culprit is not a leaking oil well, but nature. The ocean floor is spilling large quantities of oil and natural gas through fissures that geoloists call seeps. Says Petroleum Geologist Robert Gaal of the California State lands commission: "There are thousands of them...
...late March and early April after more than a century, it killed 187 people, forced thousands from their homes and created havoc over a wide area of Mexico. Since then, 3,721-ft. El Chichón (The Lump) has simmered down, giving off only occasional blasts of steamy vapor. But the mountain continues to be an object of intense scientific concern. Though the initial blowup was relatively small. El Chichón pumped so much dust and debris into the upper atmosphere-perhaps more than any other volcano since 1912-that the earth's climate could be adversely...