Word: conning
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...shoot at top speed, flinging one-liners all the way, to that place in her head where it seemed like a simply terrific idea--terrific!--to get a tattoo, cut off her hair and convert to Judaism, preferably Orthodox, though not before heading to Mexico with that muscular ex-con from the tattoo parlor. Which is how she ends up in Tijuana, knocked silly on OxyContin and slumped in a pool of her own vomit. The Best Awful (Simon & Schuster; 269 pages) can be a very funny book, but generally the laughs come hard...
...shows on CD last year for a column on Sellers. Puns, outlandish narrative detours and other foolery are wildly evident in Milligan?s scripts. In the ?Ill Met by Goonlight? episode, the Goons land on Crete. Sellers: ?Ooh, this beach is hard.? Secombe: ?Then we must be on con-Crete!? They...
John le Carre is a pseudonym. He was born David Cornwell in 1931, the son of a high-flying, charismatic con man who racked up millions in bad debts; his mother left when David was 5. His father's many frauds left Le Carre with a natural gift for duplicity that he turned to professional advantage. For an undisclosed period of time from the late 1940s into the 1960s, he worked for Her Majesty's Secret Service, though he is quick to downplay his exploits. "I was never James Bond or anything like it," he insists. "I sat behind...
...work in a dank bomb shelter that had been converted into a lab. His task was to use an atomic force microscope to get a "snapshot" of the DNA molecule. All he seemed to be getting, though, was a headache. The microscope, which detects the con-tours of molecules by dragging a flexible sliver of coated silicon over them, was malfunctioning. After puzzling through his problem for months, Thundat realized one rainy day during a rare midday foray outdoors that the microscope's probe was warping as it sponged up moisture from the air. Intrigued, he ran a simple experiment...
...North Korea's neighbors prepare to be fleeced, one may wonder: What keeps this con going? It's not that American and Asian leaderships are invincibly ignorant. They've just bought into a variant of La Grande Illusion (as such thinking was called in France in the late 1930s). The notion that the Kim regime has absolutely no intention of ever giving up its nuclear capability?at any price, for any reason?is too terrible to face. Better to play pretend, even if this means being bilked in return for fake "breakthroughs" and bogus "accords...