Word: 1950s
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Everyone knows ELVIS PRESLEY met his future wife Priscilla while stationed in Germany in the late 1950s. News has surfaced that another underage girl captured his attention around that time, only she didn't find out about it until 39 years later. In 1960 Karen Golz, then a 10-year-old German schoolgirl, sent Elvis an effusively admiring letter in which she promised to marry him and informed him of her upcoming birthday. Elvis, touched, penned a return missive: "Dear Karen, may you have a very happy 11th Birthday and a lot of 'Teddy Bears.' Your Friend, Elvis," and gave...
...eagle. And, for that matter, a young child's chances of being abducted period are not much higher (especially if you eliminate cases involving custody disputes and other family feuds). Yet to stave off this peril, we're giving kids coloring books that have the psychological impact of the 1950s movie Invaders from Mars, in which the child protagonist learns that anyone--next-door neighbors, even the police--may be a robotic Martian convert...
...this happen? Who is responsible for the bug we call Y2K? Conventional wisdom goes something like this: back in the 1950s, when computers were the size of office cubicles and the most advanced data-storage system came on strips of punched cardboard, several scientists, including a Navy officer named Grace Murray Hopper, begat a standard programming language called COBOL (common business-oriented language). To save precious space on the 80-column punch cards, COBOL programmers used just six digits to render the day's date: two for the day, two for the month, two for the year...
...influences policy and electoral politics. For evidence, they point to the fact that nearly every member of Congress professes some form of traditional faith and that no atheists ever run for public office because they would automatically lose. They call our attention to events like Congress' vote in the 1950s to put the word "God" onto our paper money, into our national motto and into our Pledge of Allegiance; the Congress and President Reagan's formal declaration that 1983 was the "Year of the Bible"; and the recent increase of the Religious Right's stranglehold on the Republican party...
...polluting the Everglades, sugar farmers have made their runoff water twice as clean as the legal standard. The $3 billion-to-$8 billion Everglades repair cost is for replumbing the entire water system of South Florida, where the population has grown tenfold since the system's construction in the 1950s, with suburbs pushing out farmland. Sugar farmers have spent millions meeting one of the nation's toughest water-quality standards. Rather than sparing sugar, the 1995 farm bill ended domestic acreage allotments, restricted low-risk loans and created a domestic free market in sugar. The industry has seen radical restructuring...