Word: cleverisms
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...that he vowed QVC would simply stand pat, which was tantamount to a claim of victory. Nor was it clear why Huizenga, whose extraordinarily successful Blockbuster has been on a prodigious buying spree of its own for the past year, would cede control of his own company. Huizenga, a clever and willful entrepreneur who had built the company into not only the largest retailer of home videos and Hollywood's largest single customer but also the majority owner of Spelling Entertainment, Republic Pictures and the Florida Marlins baseball team, mystified analysts by agreeing to be the merged company's vice...
Antics such as this make it difficult not to treat Zhirinovsky as a cartoon -- a man more deserving of ridicule than fear. That may be a mistake. Whether he believes what he says or not, he is clever, complex, and he keenly understands how to use publicity with devastating effectiveness. Says the Hudson Institute's Richard Judy: "He is a master of the bombastic and shocking statement -- and politically it works...
...million at the North American box office), Wayne's World ($122 million) and Beethoven ($57 million) tickled audiences with humor that stretched all the way -- about a foot and a half -- from sitcoms to Saturday Night Live. The SNL-bred Wayne's World was agreeably hip, loose and clever, as befits smart guys acting goofy. But the other two films were hapless rehashes of working-girl and family themes done to death by the networks...
...during the 1992 campaign, "especially on drugs. You can't get serious about crime without getting serious about drugs. Bush thinks locking up addicts instead of treating them before they commit crimes -- or failing to treat them once they're in prison, which is basically the case now -- is clever politics. That may be, but it certainly isn't sound policy, and the consequences of his cravenness could ruin...
...Secret Room, by Uri Shulevitz (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $15). Once upon one more time, we have the slightly dippy king who craves the answer to a riddle ("Why is your head gray and your beard black?"), the humble but clever man who provides it and the nasty court counselor who is jealous. Humility prevails and spin-doctoring fails, as invariably happens in stories. The author's angular tempera illustrations are vivid and funny -- the camel on which the king perches is an unusually thoughtful and sardonic beast -- but the somewhat preachy story doesn't add much...