Word: actioneers
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...honest, that hope began to darken as I thumbed through the production notes prior to a screening of Get Smart. Many persons involved with the movie prattled on about their swell new action sequences "worthy of any thriller" with their up-to-date "scale and scope." Scale? Scope? Are they kidding? Here's the deal, guys: action sequences are not funny. They never have been and they never will be. For they require that their protagonist set aside his bumbling physical incompetence and start acting decisively and heroically. At which point our connection with him is broken and he becomes...
...someone to force the bank to stop harassing you with phone calls? O.K., but you can achieve the same result for the cost of a stamp by sending a letter citing the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act, which says lenders can call only if they're taking a specific action against you. How about hiring someone to make the bank give you thousands of dollars in moving expenses during foreclosure? Sounds grand, but a homeowner can lock in this money--it's called "cash for keys"--just as easily as a company representing him by promising not to trash...
...Pulp novels and newspapers carried lurid tales of violent drunkenness. Today news stories offer grim accounts of high school parties that end in gruesome wrecks and of college kids killing themselves by consuming, say, 100 shots in as many minutes. Last year the Surgeon General issued a "call to action" to prevent underage drinking; the National Institutes of Health issued a similar...
...urgent that the government seems ready to spend what it would take to truly revive the dead zone. Although Grumbles points out that an action plan isn't the same thing as a budget allocation, there's little evidence that anyone is prepared to bear the financial burden of drastically reducing fertilizer runoff in the Midwest. (It doesn't help that 31 states feed into the Mississippi River basin, or that multiple federal agencies are involved with the dead-zone task force.) A 2007 report by the National Research Council called for more aggressive leadership by the EPA to coordinate...
...more acres for corn than they have since World War II - including 15 million more acres last year than in 2006. Although there are measures farmers can take to limit fertilizer runoff, those changes are expensive, and there's little federal funding to support such conservation. The just-released action plan relies mostly on voluntary activities. "We need Congress to act as if this is going to get done," says Doug Daigle, a member of the task force. "The state governments will contribute, but this has to be initiated by the Federal Government...