For instance, when sodium is burned, it becomes a snotlike goo that fouls boiler tubes and drives engineers nuts.

Greensticks are generally closed fractures, but occasionally with external wounds they become open.

My youngest child is forty-three this year.

He told me that due to the interaction of certain moon phases with the broken coastline and offlying islands in that region, once every four years for four days they experience what are known as ‘king tides’. These tides can rise twenty feet above normal tide levels. The king tide phenomenon was not recorded in the tide tables or charts, so I had no way of knowing they existed when planning the exercise.