Word: elfs
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...housing issues in the Harvard College Dean's Office since his first year. In previous years he has authored the annual Inside the Houses packet distributed annually to first-year students to explain the lottery system. He also helped to develop the computer system, called the Electronic Lottery Form (ELF), with which first-year students participate in the housing lottery...
...screen, a cartoon elf or sprite or something pokes its head out from behind a window, then draws it back. No, I'm not a paranoid schizophrenic -- this is the much-hyped intelligent agent who comes with the box. I ignore it, make my escape from Gameland and blunder into a lurid district of the Metaverse where thousands of infomercials run day and night, each in its own window. I watch an ad for Chinese folk medicines made from rare-animal parts, genetically engineered and grown in vats. Grizzly-bear gallbladders are shown growing like bunches of grapes...
...jewel in the crown that is this collection is "SantaLand Diaries," the closing essay. The piece recounts Sedaris' stint working as an elf at Macy's SantaLand. From his weeks wandering the candy cane-lined mazes of SantaLand and pretending to cavort with mechanical penguins, Sedaris has defracted a chilling portrait of that dark region of the New York shopper's soul which emerges at Christmas. His eye is merciless and this memoir reads like stand-up Dante. Sedaris has seen what most of us choose not to, and we should be grateful for his act of witness...
...UMPS ARE BIASED. Pitchers carp about an elf-size strike zone and umpires who call close pitches in the batters' favor. "Borderline pitches make the difference," says White Sox starter Alex Fernandez, "and the umps don't give us those calls. They don't make guys swing the bat." Instead, hitters can wait for that fat one. Speaking of which...
...same time, French companies that did big business with Baghdad want to resume a lucrative connection. State-owned oil giants Elf Aquitaine and Total were the first Western firms to make contact with Baghdad after the war. Iraqi authorities proposed to give the two French companies a rich production monopoly developing the Majnoun Islands and Nahr Umar oilfields, which could produce 1 million bbl. a day. In exchange, the Iraqis wanted the French to lobby for lifting U.N. sanctions. Since then, according to the weekly Canard Enchaine, representatives of the two companies have made more than 40 trips to Baghdad...