Word: blunting
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...term for a female agent assigned to seduce a target; raven: the male counterpart of a swallow). Beyond these terms are detailed entries about notable spies of yesteryear (Daniel Defoe, Christopher Marlowe), as well as those of more recent vintage (Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Whittaker Chambers, Kim Philby, Anthony Blunt, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Jonathan Pollard...
Apparently, bad-mouthing the breed is considered the only way to blunt a Disney-fueled demand that could cause thousands of ill-conceived Dalmatians to be dumped on the market by puppy mills and thousands more dumped in the street by bored children who didn't really bank on that cuddly little puppy's growing up. Given the disaster-movie tone of the reports, it wouldn't surprise me to see citizens running in panic from their homes, shouting, "Help! Help! Dalmatian meltdown...
...will go on until one contender backs down. In her blunt way, Madeleine Albright, the U.S. representative on the Security Council, makes it clear that it won't be Clinton. "Look," she said after she cast the lone vote against Boutros-Ghali in the 15-member council last week, "we are opposed to Boutros-Ghali. And we have the veto here." As his chief African backers decide hanging on to a second term for their continent is more important than retaining Boutros-Ghali, he has little time left to withdraw with some dignity intact...
...matter of dispute. Peterson has told authorities that he wrapped the infant in a garbage bag and threw it in the motel's Dumpster. He says the baby was alive. But the autopsy reveals that the boy died from multiple skull fractures with injury to the brain "due to blunt force head trauma and shaking." The implication is that Grossberg and Peterson did not merely abandon the child but beat it and killed it. Delaware has charged the youths with murder. If they are found guilty, they could be executed...
...Ellroy's attempt to fulfill the second part of this bargain with himself, and it largely succeeds. Readers new to Ellroy may find his clipped, staccato prose disconcerting, particularly when it describes details of his mother's corpse and the procedures at her autopsy. He is also quite blunt about the sexual allure that memories of his mother--he calls her the Redhead--bring up for him: "I had to relive my incestuous fantasies and contextualize them and embellish them past the shame and the sense of boundary that always restricted them. I had to shack up with my mother...