Word: harmless
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...heal without a cop on every corner. The courts? Furrows had served his time for his confused knife-wielding at a mental-hostpital check-in desk; he was on probation because he hadn?t hurt anybody before. And the First Amendment says that even Neo-Nazis must be deemed harmless until they prove us wrong. This being frontier-hewn America, which because it cannot forswear all its guns forswears almost none of them, a Buford Furrow is bound to happen, and will happen again. This time, everybody survived but a substitute mailman, who had an absent colleague?s route that...
...long been a credo of pilots that death in any airplane accident is rarely caused by a single, catastrophic failure. Rather, it's usually the result of a succession of small failures, each essentially harmless, but building a sort of disastrous momentum until the weight of the accumulated errors brings the plane down. Similarly, there was nothing especially portentous on the final day of Kennedy's life that led, ineluctably, to tragedy. It's only in hindsight that it becomes apparent how the random eddies of those last 24 hours carried Kennedy, his wife and sister-in-law to disaster...
This sort of false intimacy isn't new, of course. People wept when Rudolph Valentino died in 1926 and when the Lindberghs lost their baby in 1932. It's natural and in most ways harmless to identify with the famous. But today's combination of busy lives, fragmented families and saturation media coverage of celebrities means this is the only intimacy many of us experience outside our immediate family. And that's unhealthy, because these celebrity relationships...
...tend to give women more mammograms and clinical breast exams; such early-detection methods can help avoid the need for surgery altogether. The upshot: new safeguards that both political parties seek won't change much in the real world. But that doesn't mean such body-part legislation is harmless. "Once Congress starts mandating benefit by benefit," laments Fran Visco, president of the National Breast Cancer Coalition, "they won't have time to do anything else...
...decision drew fire from the Web site's owner, Ken Williamson, who said he had not been contacted by University officials about the decision, which he said was an overreaction to a harmless joke...