Word: badness
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Gramm-Rudman bill! This simplistic cure-all had been lying around since last summer, gaining a modest amount of support. Now, as an amendment to the bill increasing the debt limit, it became what Co-Sponsor Rudman wryly called "a bad idea whose time has come." There was no time for committee hearings; many members never read the measure that gave away their responsibilities, but they overwhelmingly voted for it; final approval came at 10:15 p.m. on the eve of the prospective default, and then it was soon time to go home for Christmas. Yes, Virginia, there...
...famous Rodgers and Hammerstein tune suddenly sound tinny and surreal. The state was beset by 13 bank failures in 1985, more than in any year since the Depression, as well as more than 6,000 bankruptcies and farm-loan defaults. Still, Sooners were not prepared for the latest bad news: the oil well on the lawn of the state capitol in Oklahoma City has gone dry. Nicknamed Petunia when drilled in a flower bed in 1942, the well and the derrick atop it became a symbol of Oklahoma's boom times. Drawing from an oil pool directly beneath the capitol...
First the bad news. From an all-time high in 1984, box-office take in the U.S. and Canada dropped 7%, to $3.75 billion. The number of tickets sold fell 11%, to 1.06 billion. For the first year since 1979, no film returned as much as $100 million to its makers (though Back to the Future, the 1985 champ, should soon reach that goal). Variety Industry Analyst Art Murphy sees this slump as a cyclical phenomenon: the film economy booms, too many films are made to chase the extra dollars, the flurry of competition leads to hasty decisions, then...
...paperback industry or a tuna special for the grocery store." Paul Schrader (American Gigolo, Mishima) is even more emphatic: "The times they are achangin'. We should ride the technical and social evolution and speak to the medium most preferred. If the dinosaurs don't like it, too bad for them...
...everyone thinks that Wizard of Oz products are bad. "There's nothing wrong with vaporware," says Daniel Bricklin, co-author of VisiCalc. Bricklin believes prototypes were crucial to that product's eventual success. "With VisiCalc," he says, "nobody knew what I was talking about until I wrote the program." To spare others that inconvenience, he has created something he calls Dan Bricklin's Demo Program, which enables a software developer to construct a convincing demonstration even if the software has not yet been written. Bricklin calls his product "a vaporware generator." But it is not quite ready for market...