dead consumption

He was trying to poison the animal with no success. He began finding hairballs that foamed, even steamed. He noted the different states as he tried different poisons, and he concluded that this animal had the natural ability to collect any ingested poison into one of these bezoars so that it could safely expel it. Now could he devise a way to defeat this mechanism?

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countervailing breeze

The sorceress cast several delaying spells on the lawyers who had surfaced. She retreated to her windmill to contemplate whether it was more to her advantage to stiffen the insurance laws, or make them squishier.

the barricaders

A gas bubbled through the oil and corroded the camshaft. It gave the metal a mushy, foamy skin. Our use of acronyms led to false assertions, and delayed the most effective tests, but finally the presence of proteins told us it was more of a growth than a seepage. That gave us hope that it could be combatted.

supply of demand

The management of the restaurant were prosecuted for telling their waitstaff to convince their customers that the items that were in short supply were actually plentiful, and so often consumed as to be pedestrian; while pushing the items they had in surplus, at a premium as rarities. The charge was not not fraud, exactly, or rather the injured parties were not the customers. The specific charge was a perversion of market laws, and the injured party was the state, which could not collect the correct taxed without a accurate market signals.

healathon

The medical school would have hackathons where several identical synthetic patient was presented to different teams with the same malady. The teams competed in diagnosis and treatment. An indigent snuck in and took the place of one of the synthetic patients in order to have his own malady treated.

unreciprocated

The storm raged four days. The two sides agreed to abandon the acceptance ceremony on the third day after many of the tents and equipment had been washed away. The fourth day was spent prepping for leaving. After the storm finally passed both sides had not time to do anything but leave with what they had salvaged. One tribe left with the gift, but the other never received the formal thanks that was due them. Relations were strained from then on.

licensure

Those who passed their drug tests were given licenses to consume them in public places, such as concerts, parks, and galleries. There was considerable debate about whether the tests measured something innate, or an acquired skill. Schools appeared to teach people how to study for and pass the tests. A Congressional committee looked into whether the licenses should have to be renewed.

unfastened arrow

I did not trust her concern over the new feather. I suspected another motive behind it. But her concerns were not cultural but technical. This was proved finally when she presented a better model, that would surely win the battle, we all, finally, felt sure.

treating the subject

In the attic we found boxes of grandma’s old limbs. The oldest were rusted. The others wore a film of gooey sweat that was filled with accreted dust. She hadn’t had an upgrade in years, decades, we speculated. Maybe she couldn’t get one anymore, and that’s why she hated the advertisements for them? Or maybe she had some deeper regret that she had replaced her originals at all. Maybe she knew that since all of them would be obsolete, they all harbored some secret shortcoming, like all things? We would never dare ask her directly. We sat all afternoon and spun more and more complicated, more and more metaphysical arguments for her.

nautilus

The idea was to section the tire like a nautilus to make it resilient to punctures. But it was hard to keep at a consistent pressure. They researched having a valve between each chamber so that the pressure would equalize over time, but that left the entire tire vulnerable to slow leaks. The best compromise was to limit the number of chambers to what could be conveniently filled individually to the same pressure, while having enough chambers so that the loss of one would not be catastrophic. His topographical analysis suggested a clear answer, but after he was given a set of the tires to test, he began to doubt the underlying mathematical theory.