Word: barnum
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...then, the police had another murder on their hands. Last Tuesday, they say, Thill and suspect Jeremiah Barnum, 23, bullied Dia, a hotel housekeeper, at a bus stop and knocked off his hat. When nurse's assistant Jeannie VanVelkinburgh picked it up for him, Thill opened fire. Dia died in minutes; VanVelkinburgh, a single mother of two boys, is paralyzed from the waist down. "It wasn't a planned thing," Thill told local station KMGH-TV. "Drank a little bit. I'm a deep thinker. Walked through town with my gun in my waist, saw the black guy and thought...
...have been mistaken for a calcified Superman with a biblical pedigree evokes patronizing chuckles today. But Jacobs, an undersung writer (Beautiful Soup, The Egg of the Glak and Other Stories), treats bunkum and hypocrisy as endearingly ambivalent national traits. Unsurprisingly, his all-time champion of this view is P.T. Barnum, who at one point tells General Tom Thumb that "our mission is to startle and amuse, to make our audience pay too much for too little and forget to hang us from the nearest lamppost...
...Barnum is one of the more honest characters in Jacobs' conflation of fact and fiction. In effect, the legendary showman leads a kind of geek chorus of real and imagined religious zealots, yellow journalists, gangsters and robber barons. The Wall Street rogue Jay Gould actually sells someone a piece of the Brooklyn Bridge. A Jewish peddler leaves the fold to become a dowser for parched anti-Semites. Hull changes the name of a new cigar from Pickaninny to Uncle Tom after hearing that black smokers might be offended...
...Combine the braininess of the legendary black scholar W.E.B. DuBois and the chutzpah of P.T. Barnum, and the result is Henry Louis Gates Jr.," the article said...
...stuck with the show, not so much out of interest as sheer curiosity. Brother shot illegitimate brother, children stabbed wild-eyed parents and family pets went berserk in a mad freakshow frolic before my very eyes. Forget Barnum & Bailey, I thought, southern Florida is where it's at: a world where suspects get "Mirandized" and the camera never stops rolling, even when characters appear wounded or in various states of undress...