Word: flopping
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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From the start of his presidency, Jimmy Carter has had to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous Brother Billy. Capitalizing on his instant notoriety as a colorful presidential next of kin, Billy Carter has done everything-for a fee-from judging belly-flop diving contests to promoting a beer named after him. Last year Billy finally ended up in the renowned alcoholic rehabilitation service of the Long Beach Naval Regional Medical Center for a seven-week drying out. Things were less antic for a while, but last week, adding to Jimmy Carter's woes this election year, Billy...
...throws off sweat like a lawn sprinkler. His eyes bulge. His hands claw at his throat. He may be trying to loosen his tie, but it looks as if he is trying to strangle himself. The whole performance is a screwball incarnation of the comedian's deepest nightmare: flop sweat, the purgatorial feeling of bombing out, when every joke falls like a barbell and the only laughs come when you introduce the band. Other guys fight their way past flop sweat, or cool it out. For Rodney Dangerfield, cool is a dial on a Fedders. He sets fear...
...wild ideas, gags, nutty notions for routines. A few made it out of the drugstore. Some, like Joe Ancis, were brilliant in the booth and on the street; Bruce once admitted that he owed maybe a third of his act to Joe. But Ancis trembled before the prospect of flop sweat. He never went onstage. Others, like Rodney, fought the flops, but never got out quite far enough. When he married Singer Joyce Indig, he was close to 30 and still far from the big time. He worried that long weeks working joints on the road would hurt the marriage...
...President Carter postpones production of the neutron bomb after urging NATO members to accept it, another U.S. foreign policy flip-flop that leaves Europeans more confused and less certain of American leadership...
...program is now virtually ignored; the Eighth Plan, covering 1981-85, will not even contain specific growth targets. In the past, programs directed by the French government produced too many white elephants, like the supersonic Concorde and the steelmaking complex near Marseille, that look brilliant to a bureaucrat but flop in the marketplace. Admits François de Combret, the top French presidential economic adviser: "A bureaucrat like myself, with his butt in a chair all day long, does not know