Word: confounder
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Those commercials--pay $1 and you could save a life!--confound me. On the one hand, relative to kids starving to death in India and Africa (and even here in the United States), all of us have it pretty good. If anything, these ads drive home the fact that our comparative affluence is a quirk of fate, an accident in circumstance. Therein, I suppose, lies the point: by making us feel good about ourselves (or lucky), these organizations hope to get our dollars...
...lose something in time lag. It is not that they lose their suspense or mystery. And it is not that the anticipation of their retelling many years from now demands an anecdotal "what I was doing as I turned 21." These times are special because they are urgent. They confound the order of life by acting like petulant children. They demand to be entertained right at this moment and I indulge them because I know that if I don't, I will not deserve the wish I make when I catch the clock turning...
Some U.S. intelligence officials believe North Korea has resumed a serious effort to build nuclear weapons. Evidence from multiple sources has persuaded them that leader KIM JONG IL is pushing the construction of a new reactor--underground to confound U.S. spy satellites--and trying to design usable atom bombs, possibly including missile warheads. Other analysts disagree; some Clinton Administration officials think hard-liners are leaking these reports to choke off congressional support for oil shipments to North Korea, which the U.S. pledged to fund in 1994 as part of a deal that shut down Pyongyang's known nuclear program. Even...
...series, which has turned the paranormal and paranoidal into Sunday-night morality plays, becomes a theatrical movie. Will the canonical secrets (about, say, Mulder's lost sister Samantha, purportedly abducted by aliens when she was nine) be explained? Will the show's dense mythology, replayed in the feature film, confound those ignorant of the backstory? Will the film disappoint the X-philes, the most demanding fans around...
...case you haven't heard, the wildly overrated writer-director of Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown has decided to amuse and confound the New York theater scene by accepting a part in a much-ballyhooed revival of Frederick Knott's classic 1966 thriller, Wait Until Dark. Tarantino plays Harry Roat, a ruthless drug smuggler who coerces two small-time hoods (Stephen Lang and Juan Hernandez) into helping him recover a shipment of heroin hidden in the apartment of an unwitting couple. When they discover that Suzy (Marisa Tomei), the homebound wife, is blind, the crooks wait for her husband...