In one episode of The Clangers, they were bombarded by a machine that produced plastics, and they had to get rid of it – it was all about what do we do with all these surplus man-made materials.
One of the city's surplus men, curious as to what Kern was seeing, crept out from one of the few sheltering doorways left on Weiser Street.
As early as the end of the 11th century, the West turned its numerical superiority to advantage: In 1095 Pope Urban II was able to send surplus men to recapture Jerusalem.
The government may decide to use the surplus men as a weapon for military adventurism and "actively desire to see them give their lives in pursuit of a national interest".
Many surplus men of marriage age often trigger competitive tensions in the marriage market, so parents with an unmarried son have to signal via building fancy houses for marriage (Wei et al., [2012]), investing in expensive durable goods, throwing a costly wedding reception (Brown et al., [2011]).
This obsession with boys is also ominous for boys, for China will have 30 to 40 million surplus men by 2020.
Throughout the book, twinges of sadness are behind the commoditization of sex and marriage, the anxiety of parents, the plight of surplus men and the discrimination facing women.
Take the camouflage pants this peace-mongering, art-loving mom so loves: My first pair was army surplus, men's (as at the time there was no such thing as a straight cut, low-waisted woman's pant), bought while in college.
There are two mechanisms that could explain this relationship: more economically developed areas have greater "MMM", mobile men with money, who may have higher sexual risk; or more economically developed areas have greater "surplus men", so called because this group of unmarried, poor migrant men cannot find wives.
The disproportionate surplus men may also increase homosexual activities.
When surplus men become surplus clients [ 17], HIV/AIDS incidences may rise rapidly.
