Word: besting
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...especially Blair's support of the Bush Administration's plan to invade Iraq. (With some ghoulishly good timing, Blair had to spend six hours last month defending his Iraq record in the Chilcot Inquiry.) The book, published in 2007, was widely seen as Harris's score-settling. (See the best books of the decade...
...bought your ticket, you'll stick around through the simmering accumulation of details. In that sense, The Ghost Writer is as comforting in its temperate pace and eerie mood as it is chilling in its plot particulars. Polanski feigns interest in the genre's requisite chases, but he's best at stranding the Ghost in wide frame, on a turbulent island, and tightening the noose around his neck as he gets closer to an awful truth. Alexandre Desplat's violins saw away, in approved Bernard Herrmann fashion, as appliers and absorbers of dramatic shocks; and McGregor brings all his charm...
...mostly in Massachusetts, the movie was shot at Berlin's Babelsburg studio, where Polanski earlier created the Warsaw Ghetto for his most explicitly autobiographical film, The Pianist, for which he won the Academy Award for Best Director in 2003. The Ghost Writer is unlikely to earn him such acclaim. The villainy surrounding its hero is vast but not, in Oscar terms, important; and there are a few giggle moments, as when one of Lang's women pops into the Ghost's bed. But we should hail a movie that recalls creepy political thrillers of the mid-'70s, back when some...
...wrist in question belonged to Carol, a super-busy young mom, married to Peter, one of my best buds from college. Late-spawning academic types, they live in a city of world-famous hospitals. The picture with the e-mail was a familiar x-ray to every orthopedist. Carol's wrist was sporting a nasty fracture of the distal radius - the larger of the two long bones in the forearm, just at the joint. The bone was in a few pieces (the fracture was "comminuted"), and it broke into the joint (it was "intra-articular") but none of the pieces...
From a thousand years B.C right up to the Clinton years, we've treated fractures like Carol's with closed reduction and casting. "Treating it closed" meant we set it ("reduced the fracture"), i.e. pulled and twisted (hopefully with some anesthesia) to get the pieces into the best position possible, then we held the wrist still in a plaster cast for a month and a half - 40 days and 40 nights being the magic healing time for most things orthopedic. Done well (and soon) closed reduction works quite well; an experienced orthopedist with good hands can take some horrible-looking...