Word: woode
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...makes the front page and tops the evening news. Exploiting this seemingly insatiable appetite for presidential news was one of the Reagan Administration's key contributions to the long history of White House press manipulation. By placing the President in attractive settings -- meeting foreign heads of state or splitting wood at his California ranch -- the White House p.r. apparatchiks provided the networks with the daily supply of visuals they desired, while cultivating the image of an active and accessible leader. In reality, Reagan was carefully cloistered from reporters, who could rarely do more than shout questions at him over...
That, as seems to be said more and more these days, was then. I believe that I am now the only wood-stove bore still active on my mile of dirt road. My neighbors have concluded that full-time wood heating is dirty, dangerous (chain saws are worse tempered than alligators), economically foolish, a champion time waster and brutishly hard work. In this they are correct...
...longer true, alas, that the wood-stove bore can warm himself twice, once by bragging about the money he is saving and again by preening at the perfection of his environmental posture. Heating oil, for the moment, costs less per gallon than bottled no-lead spring water. Never mind economy, however. There are congested localities such as Aspen, Colo., and Missoula, Mont., where wood burning is immoral, toxically wasteful and severely curtailed. The sweet-smelling, picturesque blue-gray smoke rising from Grandma's condo on a crisp December morning simply loads the air with too much additional junk...
...Thus the wood-stove bore is without defenses, except to say that his obsession is unlikely to melt down New England and that it adds no net CO2 to the atmospheric greenhouse (a fallen tree gives off the same amount of carbon and oxygen whether it rots or burns, and a new tree that spreads in its place takes CO2 out of the air as it grows...
...Wood burning in the late '80s is no more sensible or righteous than mountain climbing. There was an old gent in my town, died a couple of years back, who split and stacked huge piles of wood well past his 80th birthday. He had plenty of money and an unused oil furnace, but wood splitting felt right to him, made sense. For a time, during the trendy days of wood stoves, he was a hero. After wood stoves lost their vogue and he continued to split firewood, he was thought mildly eccentric. Then he died...