Word: clever
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Sometimes the Pentagon's censors are too clever by half. Or by whole. Take this excerpt from the transcript of closed-door testimony on the 1981 defense budget that was released after sensitive information had been snipped out by the Defense Department: "On Jan. 14, there were 110 F-14s at Miramar [a naval air station near San Diego]. Of these aircraft, a total of [deleted] F-14s, or 47%, were classified as mission capable. The remaining [deleted] F-14s, or 53%, were grounded for parts and maintenance...
...Then clever moneymen discovered another loophole in the rules: give the gifts or bonuses to the depositor's friend. Gifts of cash generally have proven more popular than appliances and other goods, possibly because cash can be more easily divided...
...students laboring under the belief that the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics is run from Moscow. Apparently acting independently, the Russian ambassador to America decides that the capitalists "must be stopped--at any cost." The Russians plan to resink the Titanic. Once it is raised, the clever foreigners phone in a false distress call, deluding the good-hearted American destroyer guarding the resurrected liner into leaving. Then, a Russian envoy boards with the news that the Russian "research vessel" is actually a warship (will they stop at nothing?) and adds that the Titanic will be torpedoed "in exactly eight minutes...
...confusion at the film's center when you realize that DePalma plundered the plot, the essential development of jolts, twists and red herrings, from Hitchcock's Psycho. There are two shower sequences, and a murder in an elevator--which is pretty much like a shower--and a number of clever, knowing spoofs, but most of the Hitchcock parallels, if you care to match them up, are distractingly imprecise, like blotchy coloring in a comic strip, and taken together they hardly compose an adequate story. The picture runs on the suspense inherent in the situation--Who is the killer? When will...
...participation, Americans have been, well, participating, albeit in somewhat contrived fashion. Involvement in the political process rejuvenates the individual and strengthens the country. With a zeal even Tocqueville might have underestimated, the elephants trundled to the Motor City last week to climax long months of participation--or, as one clever delegate with an ear for language said, "participaction...