Word: armstrong
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Green Day singer-guitarist, Billie Joe Armstrong, once proclaimed in song, "I'm a smart-ass, but I'm playing dumb," and for many years his performance was seamless. Armstrong, bassist Mike Dirnt and drummer Tre Cool met in their late teens and displayed natural gifts for propulsive, funny, disposable punk-pop songs about masturbation and alienation. In 1994 Dookie, their first major-label album, sold 10 million copies. Multimillionaires at 22, the members of Green Day settled into a routine of churning out blink-and-they're-over records followed closely by triumphant world tours. They were not quite...
...committed the ultimate act of laziness: releasing a greatest-hits album. In 2001 the group foisted International Superhits! upon the world, and like a cartoon boulder, it ended up flattening them. "Seeing a decade of your songs laid out like that is an invitation to midlife crisis," says Armstrong, 32. "Suddenly we were asking, 'Why are we in this band? Do we want to keep doing this? And, you know, what might happen if we challenged ourselves...
...popularity gave it no incentive to evolve. But over the past few years, younger outfits like Good Charlotte and Sum 41--who admit a musical debt to Green Day--began siphoning off the aimless-adolescent market. By the time Superhits! was released, Green Day's sales were declining, and Armstrong, Dirnt and Cool, all barely 30, felt very...
Unlike the Washington bigwigs he has made a career of talking about, Armstrong Williams fesses up when caught red- handed. "My judgment was not the best," the conservative pundit admitted after USA Today uncovered a Department of Education contract paying him $240,000 to promote President Bush's No Child Left Behind law on his talk show, The Right Side, and in other TV appearances. The contract required him to "regularly comment on NCLB during the course of his broadcasts" and to encourage other journalists to talk...
...economic impact. When the oil tanker Limburg was attacked off the coast of Yemen in October 2002, insurance costs for calls to the country's ports rose by some $150,000 per ship. Such a situation would force shipping companies to make long detours around the strait, notes Dominic Armstrong, research chief for the London-based security firm Aegis Defence Services and author of a study on the dangers of maritime terrorism. "[That] could cause up to three or four weeks' extra shipping time," says Arm-strong, "the same period many companies have inventory for." Some firms could therefore find...