Word: vortex
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Feeling fairly gloomy, the car owner ambles by the Minnesota entry again. He wonders aloud about a row of plastic tabs placed at odd angles just above the rear window of a Plymouth Volare. "Vortex generators," explains a student. The little tabs cause turbulence in the air as it passes over the car, reducing "drag" and saving fuel. "Wanna see another innovation?" pipes another student from under the hood. "How 'bout this clothespin holding on the accelerator cable...
Graham Greene once noted with pride that a novelist has "a splinter of ice in the heart." In Testimony and Demeanor Casey demonstrates what one of his characters calls a "lawyer-like habit of being an objective observer in the vortex of other people's passions." Casey is not proud of his cold eye, however. Most of these stories are threaded by the narrator's regret about his role as watcher in the shallows...
...essential ingredients for a tornadic storm seem to be present, and just as surely moving inexorably toward a showdown. If the cold, swift-moving jet-stream wind persists and clashes with the warm, moist lower air from the south, the atmosphere will be forced to readjust dramatically, creating the vortex of vertical air currents that cause tornadoes...
...Oman, which means "peaceful land"in Arabic, is so remote that it has often been called the Tibet of the Arabian peninsula. Nonetheless, the thinly populated desert kingdom-820,000 people -is a 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...
That is only one of the thousands of memories that Burns has taken with her into retirement after 30 years as a White House switchboard operator, the last three as chief operator. Part technician, part diplomat and security officer, Burns and the others like her live at the vortex of the White House nervous system. Without them, Presidents can be rendered blind and dumb...