On Tuesday, construction materials littered the front lawn of the house and plastic tubing snaked down from the top floor to a cargo container.

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At the Agroturismo Vinya d'en Palerm in Sant Miquel, the Palerm family - farmers of this land since 1898 - make their own wine in a vast plastic barrel just behind the main house.

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Dubbed simply "The Cloud, " the structure would consist of two 400-foot tall mesh towers that are linked by a series of interconnected plastic bubbles, which would themselves house an observation deck inside and be used to display everything from Olympic scores and highlights to a "barometer of the city's interests and moods" outside (that latter bit comes courtesy of the group's partnership with Google).

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According to author Billy Ingram, perhaps the world's leading Winky Dink authority, many children who didn't own the plastic sheets simply took crayons they had around the house and, on Winky Dink's cue, drew directly on the glass screens of their parents' expensive first-generation television sets.

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Many are pretty tacky: full of plastic flowers, fake stained-glass windows and doll's-house pews.

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He was so proud of what he had done, and I think that we need to applaud people like that who stand up and are not afraid to go to a house, as you said, that had, you know, plastic bags over the windows and never seen anyone come out of it.

NPR: 17 min 50 sec

Families sleep in large plastic greenhouses on farms, tents have been erected in gardens, and homes that were built to house a single family now shelter dozens of people.

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