Word: gaff
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...colleagues have also studied the relationship between customers and concessionaires, including dishonest ones. With the public's growing sophistication, carnivals have had to cut down on cheating. But Truzzi identifies two shady specialists who still inhabit the carnival world. One is the carnie who "works the gaff," a hidden device to keep customers from winning games touted as tests of skill. The other is the "stick," a carnie who passes himself off as a customer to lure marks into playing gaffed games...
...naval architecture and never went beyond ninth grade. From groves on his own farm he cut white pine for her planking, black spruce for her spars, oak for her ribs. He poured the lead for her keel in two old iron bathtubs. One of his brothers made her trapezoidal, gaff-headed sails (no newfangled spinnakers for Kathi A nne). A brother-in-law made her goosenecks, blocks and deadeyes (no modernistic turnbuckles). Spoon-bowed Kathi Anne plowed a fast furrow in the races at Lunenburg Harbor...
...opens his attack by uncovering Millett's sexual gaff in her treatment of the motivation for the central murder in Mailer's own, An American Dream. Millett maintains that the novel's hero Rojack kills his wife to punish her for committing sodomous adultery. But Mailer insists (and who after all, should know better than he?) that the crime was not in fact, sodomy, but analingus. Academic perhaps, but indicative to Mailer of a mind that hedges the niceties of distinction, a mind that abandons evidence in the pursuit of thesis...
...prospect of a floating sculpture is particularly pleasing for Grosvenor because he has had long experience with the sea. Born rich and raised in the rich stretches of Newport's Ocean Drive, he sails his own 20-ft. gaff-rigged sloop. After studying architecture in Paris, he experimented with abstract expressionist painting and junk sculpture in a Manhattan loft. Then one day he stepped into an elevator that wasn't there, and the fall broke both his legs. In the course of his six-months' hospitalization he meditated and discovered his true bent. Today he first sketches...
Dozens of other anglers have tangled with Big Daddy-and always come off second best. A few years ago, Bermuda's Captain Russell Young had an epic 31-hour battle with a marlin that he estimated at 15 ft. long. Young actually brought the fish to gaff six times. Each time the gaff tore loose, and Big Daddy finally escaped when the line parted. Last year Dr. Lyman Spire of Fayetteville, N.Y., was trolling off St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands when a monster blue crashed the bait on his ul tralight 12-lb.-test line. Spire...