Word: fang
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Like most contemporary humorists, Monty Python homes in wherever it spots a cliche so rotten it's ready to split open in an explosion of laughter. They take a line like "I didn't expect the Spanish Inquisition" and turn it into a six-minute joke when Cardinal Fang bursts in shouting, "Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition" and proceeds to torture his victims wih a comfy chair and a soft pillow. During the surfeit of Mary Queen of Scots a few years ago, Monty Python produced a skit that reduced the enigmatic Scotswoman's appeal to its formulaic minimum...
...film is a mad send-up of future shock and the trappings of conventional scifi, but it works as a kind of crack-brained adventure. Fuest, who made his reputation with a couple of fang-in-cheek vampire flicks, has a good time parading Hero Jon Finch about in black - a color scheme observed even in his nail polish and toothbrush but modified in his shirts, which are sparkling white and ruffled, like a lapsed romantic poet's. It is comforting to know, how ever, that when some heroics are required, Finch can rise to the occasion...
...sharp-eyed workman spotted something strange in the limestone debris-an ivory-colored, banana-shaped object that looked like a miniature elephant tusk. Bank officials, hearing of the odd discovery, quickly called in an amateur archaeologist, Robert Ferguson, who immediately recognized the find. It was a fossilized fang from a saber-toothed tiger, an extinct, ferocious-looking creature that once stalked wide areas of the Americas...
...Fang and Claw. The Thomas affair is certainly the most shocking to occur within the labyrinth of Foggy Bottom personnel practices, but it is by no means the only one of its kind. Willard Brown, a Class 2 officer, discovered after his selection-out that the State Department had lost all of his personnel records and that consequently his name had not been considered for promotion for several years. Nor are good men being passed over just for clerical errors. The selection process in the department has traditionally been the last word in Darwinistic elitism. McClintock, although a highly regarded...
...This fang-and-claw attitude has prompted a thorough reappraisal of the State Department's personnel system. Rather belatedly, Deputy Under Secretary William Macomber Jr., the department's top administrative officer, called in Thomas' widow Cynthia and offered her virtually any job she wanted. More broadly, the selection-out rules have been changed to prevent the flagrant injustice in the systems. Now an officer who achieves Class 5 cannot be fired until he has reached age 50 or served 20 years. This way, at least, he is entitled to retirement...