Word: float
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Regardless, the Harlem rally both highlighted and increased the racial tensions in New York. But the worst was yet to come. Two days later, on Labor Day, a group of volunteer firefighters entered a float in the annual parade through the quiet, isolated Queens neighborhood of Broad Channel. The group had won the award for funniest float nine years in a row, with themes that often mocked minorities including Jews and gays, with titles like "Hasidic Park" (a parody of Jurassic Park) and "Gooks of Hazzard...
Somehow word of those offensive floats failed to make the mainstream. This year, the firefighters decided at the last minute to call their float, a decorated pickup truck, "Black to the Future, Broad Channel, 2098." It was intended, they said, to make the point that nearly all-white Broad Channel will, in the next hundred years, become integrated. To make that "point," such as it is, they wore Afro wigs and blackface, dribbled basketballs and threw pieces of watermelon at the crowd...
...week later, after Giuliani had inveighed against the float and suspended or fired the firefighters involved, the New York Times went back to Broad Channel to assess the community's reaction. "Those guys on the float, I know they play with the colored people," said one Broad Channel resident. "It was all in fun. I wish every kid in the Channel could grow up like that bunch...
...haiku competition is on Friday afternoon. I lead off with a favorite: "Eyes locked. Soul kissing./ Exchanging tongues. I awake/ Singing in Spanish." I win the match. Then I win the bout and advance to the next round. Poet after poet takes the mike. Haikus float by like snowflakes--lovely and fleeting, hard to hold onto. I win my second bout, my third, and suddenly it's the final, and I'm still in. My opponent is D.J. Renegade, a wonderful poet from D.C. Best 9 out of 17 will win the title. He offers social consciousness. I counter with...
Yeltsin's decisions to let the ruble float down as much as 34% and to put a moratorium on corporate- and bank-debt repayments are desperate measures, steps the U.S. and the International Monetary Fund advised against. If they are followed by real reforms of the tax and banking systems, the program might restore some confidence in the economy and bring investors back. But by itself, the floating ruble will slash the savings of some Russians and increase the cost of living for many, especially those who live in the cities, where more than half the food in the shops...