Word: flopped
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...town of Pula. Totò - named for the famed Neapolitan comedian, not Dorothy's pooch - has exactly one trick in his repertoire: misbehaving. He swiped everything from pasta al pesto to a half-pound of butter off the kitchen table, ran around the yard with a neighbor's flip-flop between his teeth, and even left a summer-holiday gift on another neighbor's driveway. My attempts to get him to retrieve a Frisbee failed as soon as he realized it wasn't a pork chop...
...digging a hole, probably in search of something to eat. Sitting under the stars, I began to wonder whether Totò would throw himself into the surf to save someone from drowning. Of course he'd risk it all for a castaway slice of lasagna. Or a flip-flop...
Thanks to the Internet, of course, anybody interested in reading Mein Kampf can just order a copy. And there are other ways of getting around the laws. When Broadway hit The Producers - in which two theatrical producers attempt to oversell financial stakes in a surefire flop about Nazi Germany - opened in Berlin earlier this year, it sidestepped the swastika ban by using stylized pretzels instead. For some Germans, the inventive solution - adhering to the law while winking at it - was further proof that attitudes to the past are changing. (Read: "Showtime for Hitler: The Producers Comes to Berlin...
...Transformers-size hit, or it could be another The Golden Compass, the first episode of the His Dark Materials novels; that film cost $180 million and helped drive New Line Cinema out of business. Who knows? Nearly 30 years ago, director Robert Benton mused on a famous flop of the day. "When Steven Spielberg made 1941," Benton said, "he probably thought there...
With its awful name and convoluted rules, the cash-for-clunkers program might well have been a flop, yet it turned into a surprising success, even inspiring many of its critics to call for an additional $2 billion in funding. One big reason: the program boosted July 2009 sales of new cars and trucks, giving the economy a bit of a lift...