Word: straitly
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John Glenn, for example: Wolfe sketches him as a bit of a prig, a jogging, strait-laced Presbyterian driving an underpowered Peugeot, who scolded his colleagues for their after-hours whoopee. The current Senator from Ohio, Wolfe suggests, may have gone to NASA officials in an effort to replace Shepard on the first flight. Others, too, according to Wolfe, would act in ways that demonstrated that "feeling of superiority, appropriate to him and to his kind." Gus Grissom almost certainly blew the hatch too soon, flooding and sinking his capsule, and then stubbornly maintained that the machine "malfunctioned." Scott Carpenter...
...country about the size of Kansas and has time and again been caught up in the vortex of international politics. Its 1,060-mile coastline is on the direct sea route from Europe to Asia; the country's northern tip overlooks the preferred deep channel of the Strait of Hormuz, 40 miles wide at its narrowest, through which pass half of the world's oil tankers. Says a British major on contract duty with the Oman army: "One battery of artillery or missiles on the Omani side of the strait holds life or death power over the passage...
...take military action against us, many people there would oppose it, and it would lead to an antiwar movement and perhaps even a civil war. That possibility will prevent the Communists from taking military action against Taiwan. You must [also] consider the natural barrier between us, the Taiwan Strait, which is 100 miles wide at its narrowest point and 120 miles at the broadest. [The Communists] would have to be prepared to sacrifice 1 million, 2 million or even 3 million people in an invasion that would also involve a great logistical problem for them. But for our part...
...lived not in the outback, but in the middle of the luxuriant cosatal forest between the mountains and Bass Strait. The woods were full of tree ferns; the trees were full of parrots. The topsoil was three feet thick. A welcoming kind of land, you would think...
...this absurdity is the well balanced slapstick and caricatured roles. The establishment is represented by truly Establishment figures clad in uptight strait-laced uniforms of preppie pink satin and navy pin stripe, a glossy Chivas Regal wealth versus patched jeans-adolescent revolt. It's fun to watch Treat Williams traipsing across an elaborately laid banquet table, trying to maximize shattered crystal in his path. It's not to be taken seriously, and thereby doesn't offend our sophisticated Seventies cynicism...