Word: gruffest
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Slumped on the cool tatami mats of a Japanese restaurant in Beijing, Jiang Wen looks spent. China's gruffest actor and boldest director has been slouching and smoking and dishing out melancholy in front of the camera all day, and he can look forward to more of the same through the night. His 1.83-meter, 98-kilo frame crumples against the wall, his eyes beat and basset-hound weary...
Despite such inspiring beginnings, the parliament of nations at 50 has aged into such a rattletrap that its gruffest champions acknowledge design flaws. More than ever, the Secretariat appears to be a papermaking machine, the General Assembly an unwieldy debating society, and the mishmash of agencies spread around the globe a swamp into which good intentions can sink with barely a trace. Above all, the paramount U.N. duty of keeping the peace is in disgrace. All those recent ambitions of using the Security Council as the vehicle of a post-cold war new world order, with the Permanent Five members...
...view of the armed forces' public information setup. Though some think it the best possible under the circumstances, the Reporter's Denis Warner, 48, a veteran of every Far Eastern fracas since World War II, says, "It is the worst I have known in any war anywhere." Gruffest of the growling pack is Joe Fried of the New York Daily News. "I think we get very poor service here from the authorities," he says. In the daily military briefings, known as "the 5 o'clock follies," the abrasive Fried stokes his fire and brimstone...
...full-lipped Flagg Girls looked out from the pages of every big-circulation magazine. He earned $75.000 a year from Flagg Girls and celebrity portraits, spent it freely in hard-drinking high life. Besides being the country's most famous illustrator and most conspicuous bohemian. he was its gruffest voicer of strong opinions. "I know why there are so many pretty gals in New York," he once said, "all the ugly ones are in college." He dismissed Picasso's work as "kin to the nasty scrawls chalked on alley walls by underprivileged Mongolian monster boys...
Golden-voiced Baker surely ranks as one of the better crooners: his "Love Walked In" softens up the gruffest customer and sends him away humming. In addition there are the Goldwyn Girls; Vera Zorina in a number of first-rate ballet offerings; the Ritz Brothers running hot and cold through a dozen harebrained interludes; and Phil Baker with accordion and gags. There is little doubt who makes the ranking bid to steal the show: Bergen and McCarthy at their first-flush-of-fame best sparring with Baker and more delightfully with Bobby Clark. Even the W. C. Fields routine with...