Word: blacking
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...yoga is incredibly spiritual. I know the Lord is with me in my downward dog. (See pictures of facial yoga.) 12. I was born with jaundice. 13. I was born pigeon-toed. 14. I was born with an extra kidney. I wish I could have sold it on the black market and made some money, but it was underdeveloped and did nothing but cause me to wet the bed until the third grade. 15. I like to tape my thumbs to my hands to see what it would be like to be a dinosaur. 16. A horse once fell over...
...Black Chamber," America's first codebreaking agency founded in 1919, and its head, Herbert Yardley: "When Herbert Hoover took control of the White House and named Henry L. Stimson secretary of state, the existence of the Black Chamber remained secret even to the incoming administration...After a few months had passed, Yardley decided that Stimson had settled in well enough to be informed and provided the secretary of state with a handful of decrypted Japanese messages...Outraged, he famously exclaimed, 'Gentlemen do not read each other's mail,' and sought to immediately shut down Yardley's operation...
Paglen's concern is the "black world," that parallel government bureaucracy funded by billions in taxpayer dollars, the allocation of which is never revealed. It would be misleading to take the book's subtitle at face value - the "geography" to which Paglen refers is as much metaphorical and legal as physical. (Sorry conspiracy theorists, he does not actually infiltrate any hangars at Area 51). "Blank spots on the map begat dark spaces in the law," he writes, in reference to a raft of shady government incidents from NSA wiretapping to extraordinary renditions to secret CIA missions in 1980's Latin...
...Maybe it took the absence of the guest of honor to drain the show of the usual sentiment, Hollywood gush or Friar's Club japery that lards so many of these black-tie events. The comics who trooped on the stage to praise Carlin seemed to work especially hard to explain - to themselves perhaps as much as to the rest of us - just what made him such a crucial role model for a generation of comedians that followed...
...Bill Maher says Carlin was the comic who "inspired me to think I could do things differently." Richard Belzer marvels over the "precision" of his technique. Lewis Black, perhaps Carlin's most obvious heir as an angry social satirist, says he "raised the level of our craft." Garry Shandling recalls how, as a young student at the University of Arizona, he accosted Carlin before a club date, showed him some jokes he had written, and got the encouragement that prompted him to get into comedy. After showing the full-length clip of Carlin's "Ode to a Modern...