Word: clown
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While S.S.E. members know that scorn doesn't prove that a controversial idea is right (people laughed at Darwin, after all, but they also laughed at Bozo the Clown), it doesn't prove an idea is wrong, either. "What we do," says Nelson, "is give everyone a respectful hearing. If we think a speaker is doing bad science, we consider it our duty to criticize it. We get our share of lunatics, but they don't hang around long...
...some high-level heckling. Best-selling author Joao Ubaldo Ribeiro wrote an apoplectic critique that caused such a furor last week that the government agreed to review its list. Ribeiro called the wonk who wrote the document "arrogant, cretinous and incompetent" but stopped short of calling the author a clown. (Had he done so, the government's vocabulary primer explains, "the professional who makes a living from making other people laugh might get offended.") When asked why the administration decided to suspend distribution of the document, Perly Cipriano, the tight-lipped Deputy Secretary for Human Rights, said, "Because...
...Black leaders? "We have Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, but it does not mean anything to black America, which is still under assault from the social practices of this society." Bill Cosby's criticisms of black parenting? "A billionaire attacking poor people for being poor. Bill Cosby is a clown. What do you expect? I thought it was unfair of him." His modest, soft-spoken manner belies what is obviously a deep sense of grievance. He describes sitting down at a counter not long ago and watching a white man next to him snatch $2 off the table. "He thinks...
...meaning. Instead, his first book invokes appraisals of prominent blacks from Jesse Jackson ("With Joe Louis we had made it from the guttermost to the uttermost") to Conservative Sociologist Thomas Sowell ("Louis was a continuing lesson to white America that to be black did not mean to be a clown or a lout"). But it was another boxer who put the man in true perspective. Muhammad Ali remarked after the funeral, "Howard Hughes dies, with all his billions, not a tear. Joe Louis, everybody cried." --By Stefan Kanfer
...impish face, but her pops, Robin Williams, is still the bigger clown. In House of D, ZELDA WILLIAMS, 15, is the lead's crush, while her dad is a quirky janitor...