Word: aback
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Wang Shen is a printer in China's capital, and his business is inking just about any document you want, legitimate or otherwise. But even Wang was taken aback when a man in a baseball cap strolled into his narrow, back-room shop, plonked $80 on the table and asked him to forge a pilot's license. Two days later, it was ready, expertly laminated and adorned with a pair of red seals. "It looked very real," says the 34-year-old printer. "The man came back and told me no one could tell the difference...
...Sherman graciously mentioned that it was my father that inspired him to start climbing. I was a bit taken aback since I couldn?t remember my father ever climbing anything except a stepladder. But there was that time Dad went to climbing school with my brother in the Sierra Nevada. My brother was too young to go on his own, and in an effort to become closer to his son, my Dad agreed to accompany him. He came back with his hands sliced to ribbons and stories of how he fell off the mountain three times. But my brother...
...made a big splash,” Gerken says. “Everyone was taken aback. It wasn’t the old school approach.” And while Gerken says HLS “is comfortable with our place in the world,” it cannot sit back and watch the world change around it and do nothing. “NYU has presented itself more successfully than any school in the nation and you can’t stand silent while that’s going on if you want to keep...
...collect permission slips. And they almost always do, says Marshall Pennell, the Fellowship's executive ministries coordinator. But complaints are not unheard of. In 1998 Neil Katzman, a Jewish man from Ventura, Calif., overheard his son Kenny, 5, tell a friend that "magic is the work of Satan." Taken aback, Katzman asked where he had learned that. "At school," said Kenny. It turned out that the caretakers at Kenny's after-school, public day-care program were letting kids attend Good News Club meetings in the elementary building without previously alerting their parents. Kenny had gone to at least three...
...sculpture that could interact with people." And, as he discovered, people wanted to interact with his sculpture. When he posted photos of his work on his website, he was flooded with e-mails asking if it was possible to get a doll - for sex. At first, McMullen was taken aback. Then he was skeptical. But he quickly had 10 orders for the dolls, priced at $5,000 each and paid in advance. In his garage, he and his wife - whose hands and feet, but no other extremities, are models for the dolls - built their first anatomically correct girls. Curious...