Word: boom
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Away in the hills behind the southern Beirut suburb of Baabda, the boom of Israeli heavy artillery was sending shells whistling into the area of the Hippodrome and the park called the 1,001-Pine Forest. This huge region is riddled with P.L.O. bunkers and tunnels, and houses several Katyusha rocket launchers and fieldpieces. In response, P.L.O. Katyushas came crashing down on suspected Israeli positions in East Beirut. Fires flared up along the skyline competing with the flashes and sparks of the artillery The noise level became stupendous: the whoosh-whoosh of the Katyushas, the brazen bark of the tanks...
...COMING BOOM by Herman Kahn; Simon & Schuster; 237pages...
...getting bigger. It would be futile to put a frame around The Coming Boom. The book is more like a sprawling by-the-numbers kit used to paint the dome of a new Renaissance chapel. There the enervated finger of post-industrial Adam is about to be plugged into the socket of divine science. One can even find a title for this vaulting masterpiece: CI. It stands for command, control, communications, computing/information and intelligence. Kahn is not too specific about command and control. His discussion of CI other components describes an information network that he believes should enable government...
...amendments to enshrine various panaceas, transcendent gripes, noble urges and crackpot illuminations. The process is a little like the custom of nominating obscure favorite sons at political conventions, not because they have any chance of being nominated or elected. God forbid. It is just nice to hear the name boom in the hall, to have the transient thrill, something to tell the grandchildren. The mere proposal of a constitutional amendment amounts to national billboarding for an idea, and perhaps even a way of drawing the poison out of certain issues by bringing them briefly into the hypothetical presence...
Tousled-haired and grinning diffidently, Beaver is a 20th century Tom Sawyer. Able to resist anything but temptation, he is a dimpled noble savage who regards parents as gentle adversaries to be outwitted for their own good. He is a cultural icon for the baby-boom generation, the symbol of the apple-pie joys and melted ice-cream sorrows of an idyllic suburban childhood that never really was. After a successful six-year run, Beaver went off network television in 1963, but it continued to flicker on the mental screens of a generation...