Word: fancier
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...time-honored test of one's social clout. Not anymore. A new service called DinnerBroker.com is selling dinner reservations over the Internet. Need a primo table tonight at San Francisco's swank La Folie restaurant? It's yours for 20 bucks. The better the table time and the fancier the venue, the more you pay. The service is up and running in the Bay Area and is set to launch soon in Los Angeles, New York and 25 other cities. God help...
CALL IT MINI-PC The i-Opener ($99, $21.95 a month), from Netpliance Inc., looks like a tiny PC, with a sleek flat-panel screen, attached keyboard and 56K modem for Web access and e-mail. Surfing may be sluggish at 200 MHz, and the browser may gag on fancier websites. But for folks with limited needs, it's like a Yugo: for the money, it's an adequate way to get where you want...
Among the $500,000 homes and turquoise pools in one of the fancier precincts of Irvine, Calif., the gumshoes in white moon suits and gas masks looked weirdly out of place. But there they were last Friday digging up the yard of a churchgoing suburban gynecologist who had just committed suicide. And there they were removing--gingerly--six tall plastic canisters full of military-type weaponry, high-grade C-4 explosives with blasting caps, and possibly biomedical-research products...
...even more egregious example was a packet I received earlier this year about Harvard's library system. "Jump back! It's Harvard's library system!" this packet said in 847 glossy pages. I heard that prototype versions were even fancier: they projected a hologram of President Neil L. Rudenstine beating the president of Yale over the head with Moby Dick and declaring, "Kick the crap out of learning!" Did we really need this? Was there anyone at Harvard unaware that its libraries existed? Harvard's hope must have been that some kid in Stoughton would say, "Well, Hallelujah...
...Despite its short running time the movie does occasionally become tiresome in its second half, when Morton drops out of the picture to make way for a fancier enchantress. Unfortunately, Uma Thurman disappoints as Blanche, an Anais Nin wannabe with a fetish for performing geniuses: the amusing concept of her character doesnt justify her time on screen. The period detail, though sumptuously photographed by Chinese cinematographer Zhao Fei, doesnt hold interest on its own. Happily, the film finds its way back again in the end when Emmet shows up outside Hatties laundry. A lovely scene between Penn and Morton...