Word: formerly
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Sweeps even has its own terminology: "stunt casting", which pulls a high-profile star in for a short cameo or story arc. In 2003, former Superman Christopher Reeve briefly appeared on Smallville in 2003, playing a scientist examining the young Clark Kent. A show "jumps the shark" when its ratings stunts smack of desperation. The phrase was inspired by a a three-part Happy Days special in 1977 in which Fonzie jumped over a shark pen on water skis; fans point to it as the specific moment the show started its decline. (Jumpingtheshark.com is devoted to analyzing ratings stunts...
...notion that there's a correlation between excessive pay and excessive risk-taking isn't quite accurate. It may be true in the case of hedge funds or leveraged-buyout - which call themselves private-equity (PE) - firms or some parts of stricken outfits like AIG, Citi and the former Merrill Lynch, now part of Bank of America. But hedgies and PEs aren't covered by pay czar Ken Feinberg's ukases...
...forget, too, that a fair number of Wall Streeters got wiped out because their wealth was tied to their firm's stock price. Dick Fuld, the former CEO of Lehman, had shares and options worth about $1 billion at their peak. He got less than $1 million when he sold them after the firm went bankrupt. (He still took home, before taxes, $490 million from his stock-based compensation, so don't cry for him.) James Cayne, CEO of the defunct Bear Stearns, was in a similar situation. If Fuld and Cayne had known their firms were as badly...
...Baer, a former Middle East CIA field officer, is TIME.com's intelligence columnist and the author of See No Evil and, most recently, The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower...
...easily be accused to put pressure on me ... [He was accused of running drugs] precisely after I refused to allow aerial spraying of poppies." The Times' allegations, coming to light little more than a week before Afghans head to the polls for a runoff vote between Karzai and former Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah, will be taken as a sign by the presidential palace that foreigners, once again, are meddling with his aims for a second term. (Read the 2008 TIME interview with Hamid Karzai...