Word: mp
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...back bench Members of Parliament who receive but meager salaries on which they usually manage to mantain one devoted and underpaid secretary. To such MPs crowds of keen and reasonably intelligent free research assistants are manna from heaven. With the aid of one to three such assistants the beleagured MP may now indulge in as much work as he feels suitable or necessary...
This is not to say that the foreign research assistant is necessarily onto a bad thing. On the contrary, he now has ample opportunity to enter into copious correspondence with the assorted lunatics of his MP's constituency. From them he will learn such endearing and necessary information as the fact that youth unemployment in Britain could be substantially alleviated if not actually eradicated by the simple expedient of building a wall around the Isle of Wight. This, incidentally, also would have the beneficial effect of preventing the erosion by which the island apparently is much menaced...
Lastly, the research assistant should if at all possible choose a MP whose political views are as diametrically opposed to his own as possible. This will afford him continual entertainment and teach him the valuable art of dissimulation so necessary to future success...
...market for supercomputers, those $15 million, lightning number crunchers used for everything from the search for oil deposits to the design of nuclear weapons. The company has boasted two star computer engineers: Founder Seymour Cray, 62, and Steve Chen, 43, the Chinese-born immigrant who designed the Cray X-MP, the company's best-selling machine. Last weeksupercomputerdom's best and brightest duo decided to split up. In a move that shocked the investment community -- and sent Cray's stock tumbling 8 1/2 points in a single day -- the company announced the cancellation of its most advanced supercomputer project...
...climaxes decades of brilliant ideas, technological innovations and the contributions of incandescent personalities. "Had astronomers been watching," he writes, "they could have seen ((the explosion)) reflected from the moon, literal moonshine." But moments after the artificial sunburst, witnesses became awed captives of their immediate surroundings: "The horses in the MP stable still whinnied in fright; the paddles of the dusty Aermotor windmill at Base Camp still spun away the energy of the blast; the frogs had ceased to make love in the puddles...