Word: cranked
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...confuse us with the Action Man," hesays, referring to the mysterious man whoperennially crank-calls Harvard students. "We havenothing to do with...
...their capital. Meantime, the days of bulging classrooms are long gone. The 1965-75 baby bust led to a 10% dip in the number of college-age students in the 1980s; the head count will plummet a further 25% by the mid-1990s. The ability of institutions to simply crank up tuition and fees has also hit a ceiling. Last spring Princeton scaled back a projected 6.9% hike in tuition, room and board to 6.7%, leaving a still daunting annual bill per student of $20,498. "We used to view tuition as a tithe paid by grateful parishioners," says Northwestern...
...Peter Wexler is a crank. It has something to do with his belief that everybody is a liar or, as he puts it, "smug and self-satisfied and just close enough to the facts to get by." When young Holden Caulfield complained about phonies, it had the force of discovery. Wexler's grownup bitching sounds more than a little gratuitous. Wife Lily breaks the news sweetly: "These aren't great complaints, you know. They're tired, and small, and self-serving, they're vague -- if I weren't wife-of-wives I'm not certain I'd be charmed...
...night that Houston bureau chief Richard Woodbury arrived at Cedar Point park in Sandusky, Ohio, for a test spin in the Magnum XL-200, the world's highest (205 ft.) and fastest (72 m.p.h.) roller coaster. Since the weather was expected to worsen, park officials insisted that they crank up Magnum for a ride right away. "Suddenly the gigantic structure was ablaze with lights," recalls Woodbury. "There was no way to argue, and so, as the wind whipped off Lake Erie, I was harnessed into the front seat of a soaking, nearly empty train." But fear soon gave...
...dark side is that slapdash recusal can degenerate into a form of internal book burning, a crank's bonfire. The hyperactive recuser lives next door to the know-nothings and crackpots. He is liable to mutter to himself in public. Intelligent recusal must be elegantly done. There are rules. No ethnic slurs. Avoid recusing yourself on entire countries, such as Canada. Do not go scything down whole fields of knowledge. (On the other hand, I long ago recused myself on the subject of economics, about which I am a moron, and have not suffered a day's unhappiness because...