Word: flash
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Spenser, although Spenser keeps company with Susan Silverman, a compassionate shrink). He is also short of cash and careless about his clothing. He is a two-fisted drinker (even though James Crumley's Milo Milodragovitch goes for peppermint schnapps) and sometimes drops his guard long enough to reveal a flash of erudition (Marlowe has atrocious taste in socks but can quote Browning). Touches of class cater to the tough-guy fantasies of the literati. Albert Camus, whose spare existential novels were influenced by U.S. detective fiction, looked like Humphrey Bogart portraying Sam Spade. Hemingway followed in the footsteps of Mark...
...envisioning a brave new world of one-stop networking. Commuters will set burglar alarms, start air conditioners and program their VCRs--all through the digital keypads of their mobile phones. When appliances break down, homeowners will plug them into diagnosis outlets, dial the manufacturers and be told in a flash precisely what has gone wrong. Television sets will interrupt broadcasts to announce that clothes dryers have completed their cycles. Viewers, with the press of a key, will tell those dryers to run the clothes through one more time...
...suspected terrorists. The Western powers, however, concluded that the ploy was a new attempt by the Soviet-backed East Germans to alter the unique post-World War II status of Berlin. In the past, foreign diplomats entering or leaving the East sector of the city had only to flash a red identity card issued by the East Germans. By requiring passports rather than cards, the East Germans apparently hoped to establish that the Berlin Wall is an international border --in direct contravention of postwar agreements...
...talking of potential storms that end up fizzling out, there was the varsity football fall. Despite a promising season, Crimson's triumph turned out to be a flash in the pan as our football team lost The Game for the second year in a row. I guess the difference between Jewett's and Fox's cheering didn't change the team's success...
...minutes the flash high is followed by a crashing low that can leave a user craving another hit. But that evanescent electric jolt, priced so that almost anyone can afford it, has made crack the drug of the moment. The National Cocaine Hotline (1-800-COCAINE) estimates that 1 million Americans in 25 states around the country have tried crack. From January through April, while New York City police seizures of marijuana fell off 92% from the year before and heroin seizures fell off 88%, cocaine seizures rose 41%. Crack busts already constitute 55% of all cocaine arrests...