Word: varnished
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...from and that a rainbow is just light refracted through water droplets. Maybe this is a good thing, but it sure has taken some of the magic out of parenting, not to mention childhood. Christmas, however, is a time when believers in the plain truth should consider applying some varnish. Parents might want to explain away the Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny, Elvis' ghost and E.T. But we shouldn't be too literal about Santa Claus...
...which while secular is deeply Taoist. A mile away is a Protestant church that draws 3,000 souls to its weekend services. Within a hundred miles are scores of monasteries, seminaries and altars. Despite 50 years of the most violent scrubbing, religion still coats China with an ancient varnish. And as the nation's core ideology of Marxism-Leninism cracks under the weight of the 20th century, the pope of Marxism is no longer a man controlling a monopoly. China's rickety economy and its opaque, chilly leaders have left most Chinese looking for something, someone, to believe in. "People...
...initial tease for Baekeland--"Doc Baekeland" to many--was the rising cost of shellac. For centuries, the resinous secretions that Laccifer lacca beetles deposited on trees had provided a cottage industry in southern Asia, where peasants heated and filtered it to produce a varnish for coating and preserving wood products. Shellac also happened to be an effective electrical insulator. Early electrical workers used it as a coating to insulate coils, and molded it into stand-alone insulators by pressing together layers of shellac-impregnated paper...
Initial heating of the phenol and formaldehyde (in the presence of an acid or base to get the reaction going) produced a shellac-like liquid good for coating surfaces like a varnish. Further heating turned the liquid into a pasty, gummier goo. And when Baekeland put this stuff into the bakelizer, he was rewarded with a hard, translucent, infinitely moldable substance. In a word: plastic...
Several years later, when the three labs, the University of Arizona among them, produced their wet-blanket dates for the Turin shroud, a possibility flashed through Garza-Valdes' mind. What if the shroud too had a "bioplastic" varnish--and the labs had been fooled into decreeing an object younger than it actually was? In May 1993 Garza-Valdes traveled to Turin, microscope in hand, and was put in touch with Giovanni Riggi, the microanalyst who had parceled out the 1988 samples. Riggi let Garza-Valdes examine a tiny piece of shroud that he assured him came from the same batch...