Word: yanks
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...lead-up to the launch had already produced a YouTube moment. On Tuesday, in the minutes before the expected takeoff, engineers were scheduled to pull on a lanyard to yank off a little red sock protecting a probe atop the rocket's nose. The yank cleared the probe, but the sock caught on something at the top of the rocket, something an amused NASA spokesman later insisted hadn't occurred in 500 practice runs. It took nine minutes of mostly close-up, viral-video-quality tugging before the dangling sock released, even as engineers debated whether the snafu amounted...
...brains can give rise to all manner of odd psychiatric problems, but one of the strangest is trichotillomania - better known as hair-pulling. The uncontrollable desire to yank out one's hair may seem like a freaky sideshow diagnosis, but the disorder is actually not so uncommon, affecting perhaps 2 million American adults over 22. Exact numbers are hard to come by since people with the condition often hide it - sometimes they don't even appear in public because of their embarrassing, mangy bald spots. There is no approved treatment...
...lingua franca of international hotel staffs is English, notoriously monolingual Americans, Brits and Australians probably rank higher than they should. The French readily volunteer that their practice of foreign languages leaves much to be desired, but even the harshest Francophobe would mock the poll's finding that the average Yank tourist is the better polyglot. At least that's what French travelers might argue...
...decent laugh. My conservative Christian material about how the New Testament would read if it were written by Congress also did well, although it was about as gutsy as going to the Apollo and doing uptight-white-people jokes. In fact, less gutsy, since uptight white people don't yank you off the stage with a cane...
...Just as alarming amid falling confidence: lower levels of trust in banks make customers more likely to yank their money, according to the survey. More than a tenth of those polled said they'd done just that during the crisis, preferring instead to keep their cash at home, despite the obvious dangers of doing...