Word: ersatz
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...unready - or unfit - for the Oval Office. Many have noticed that Palin isn't acting like a candidate: after her clumsy exit from the governorship last summer, she declined to hire an experienced staff or manage her public profile deftly. All that, plus her tawdry public feud with ersatz son-in-law Levi Johnston, has most of the smart money betting that Palin won't be a contender...
Chairman Mao's birthplace of Shaoshan is a powerful draw for anyone interested in Chinese history. Just don't expect to find too much history there. The town in China's central Hunan province has a museum, library and ersatz 1960s communal farm all dedicated to the founder of the People's Republic. His family home, cattle barn, shed, cattle pen and the family tomb have all been carefully preserved for the millions of tourists, many of them student groups on school-sanctioned "red tours," who visit Shaoshan each year. Newly built shrines - resembling the sort that might have been...
...there's anything TV has taught us, after all, it's that nothing is as ordinary as weird families, or as weird as ordinary ones. TV is all about families, real and ersatz, on islands and gridirons, in pitch meetings and interrogations. After a long hiatus, it's good to have the family back...
...heading off devastating climate change--and to sidestepping out-of-sight oil prices along the way--is to improve technology. We need good alternatives to fossil fuels, not the ersatz variety in which we convert corn to ethanol and then face soaring food prices. We need to harness vast amounts of solar power and start storing the carbon dioxide emitted by coal-fired power plants underground. We need green buildings that demand less energy for heating and cooling, and automobiles that get vastly more miles per gallon...
...producer Michael Mann, who made the small- and big-screen versions of Miami Vice. The Mann style is everywhere evident: in the prowling camera and elliptical editing, the pile-driving music (a surprisingly formulaic score by Denny Elfman), the gigantic, pore-probing closeups of the actors' faces, the vigorous ersatz-realism. Everything moves so much and so fast that the movie seems both gutsy and brainy. But the main strategy is to keep viewers' pulses racing so they concentrate on the action, not the message...