Word: cools
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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John Huang had never before lost his cool in front of his colleagues. Yet here was the Democratic fund raiser agitating for three top executives from the world's biggest foreign investor in China to be invited to a White House coffee for prospective donors. Party officials saw no point in taking up space with foreigners not legally entitled to contribute. But "it was the only time Huang ever snapped," a former party official told TIME. And as a result, the three men from the Bangkok-based CP Group slipped into the White House in early June...
...signs at not just one but 133,333 intersections annually, resulting in three deaths per intersection, or 400,000 dead drivers and passengers a year. Suppose further that they had not only removed the stop signs but also replaced them with go signs or, better yet, billboards advertising how cool it is to zip heedlessly through intersections without being bothered by irritating, petty-minded, governmental instructions. In fact, make those very attractive billboards featuring yellow-slickered cowboys or a suave camel named Joe. Then what do you think the sentence would have been...
...usual backhand compliment directed at an enduring Hollywood icon and say that he played--brilliantly played--Jimmy Stewart. But that ignores the pioneering vocal eccentricity, the stammer that miraculously made every line seem as if it had just occurred to him; he was Method before Method was cool. And to say Stewart played himself hardly does justice to the near Shakespearean breadth of his characters and performances. The mannerisms evolved; the man grew...
Like the modern jazzmen who were his contemporaries, he helped define cool for postwar America. He had hoboed across the country as a teenager, got into movies taking anonymous horse falls and survived a setup drug bust (he described jail as "just like Palm Springs without the riffraff"). Stardom, he implied, was just another of life's little absurdities to be sardonically observed and fatalistically played out. As the best of his screen characters did. There's a marvelously stunned stoicism in his confrontation with the inner furies that haunt him in Pursued. And when he turned to outright psychopathy...
That film's director, Charles Laughton, thought he was "one of the best actors in the world." Like Huston, Laughton saw beneath Mitchum's surpassing cool the heat of an often disappointed perfectionist. In his signature role, the private eye in the classic film noir Out of the Past, Mitchum grimly accepts doom as the price of sexual obsession and lights his passage to it with flaring wisecracks. "I don't want to die," his inamorata cries. "Neither do I, baby," Mitchum snaps. "But if I have to, I'm gonna die last." As inadvertent epitaphs go, it's pretty...