Word: whims
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Orders of Magnitude. In the summer of 1968, on a philanthropic whim, Brand loaded 40 books and assorted merchandise into a battered 1963 Dodge camper and toured New Mexico's hippie communes dispensing tools and practical advice to the new settlers. That original Truck Store turned a modest profit of $300, and Brand decided to expand into a mail-order operation that would provide wider, more efficient dissemination of theory, fact and artifact. Working for months with a small staff of testers and contributors, he turned out a catalogue with a first print order of 2,000. The book...
...blonde wife Hilla even pouts on the morning tea in their Düsseldorf apartment, she looks outside, hoping to see the kind of lead-gray overcast for which Germany's Ruhr Valley is noted. Becher's concern with the weather is not a matter of whim. He is a photographer, his subject the collieries, mills, water towers and other rugged structures of Europe's coal and steel industries. Only a dull diffused light, he has found, can properly set off the austere, utilitarian designs produced by the Industrial Revolution long before Bauhaus theoreticians made a cult...
...hums along the narrow roads in her electric wheelchair, monopolizes the right to keep pigeons and bitches, takes a 13th share of the price paid for any property, and governs the tiny islet 20 miles off the coast of France with the traditional whim of iron. Last week Dame Sibyl Hathaway, 85, one of the Western world's last feudal rulers, was furious. "I can no longer publicize this island as a haven of rest when there are 42 tractors, few of which obey the traffic laws," she said. "I am also tired of having to call on Guernsey...
...intrigued by the stone giants and observed that although some of the natives were obviously Polynesian, others had white skins and red hair. He also let his men shoot down a few indigenes after a minor misunderstanding. Subsequent Western visitors apparently felt free to kill any native on whim. In 1811, an American whaler added a touch of Yankee ingenuity. Some island girls were lured aboard. After the crew had made a night of it, the girls were forced to swim for shore while the mate took potshots at their bare backs...
...obscene. Is there not a courageous man left in this country, somewhere? I hunger for the sight of a moral man, a man of integrity, principle and reason. But all we meet are squeaking sponges and hardened arteries. Capitulation is called negotiation; absence of all principle, reason. Irrational whim is youthful idealism, the hairy savage a student with commitment. But the professors and administrators, who have fed and reared the monster by compromise after compromise, make for a spectacle that is even more disgusting...