Word: guff
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...wary reader, overdosed these many years on both Hemingway lore and mystical guff about fishing, and weary, in addition, of all too believable accounts of alcoholic decline, might tune in to Championship Bowling and leave Lorian Hemingway's memoir on the nightstand. Fair enough, but Walk on Water (Simon and Schuster; 250 pages; $23), though it does deal with booze and fishing addictions (the first deadly, the second a kind of soul's balancing act, said to be curative), is chiefly the record of a writer growing up and learning her trade...
...many of us who live in New York City did think Mayor Rudolph Giuliani was joking when he said he was cracking down on jaywalking. It was something Humphrey Bogart as a private eye might have said sarcastically to a homicide lieutenant whose guff he did not intend to take ("That's real good, flatfoot, but isn't it about time for you to go out and arrest another nun for jaywalking?"). But then a law student crossing Sixth Avenue got a $50 jaywalking ticket. What we had forgotten was that Mayor Giuliani is never joking...
...McCurry; he wouldn't touch that one. That's why he's fun to watch: he's not slimy. He never wriggles, he never answers any question twice, and he doesn't take any guff from Sam Donaldson. And he knows how to work a room; Thursday, with the scandal in full swing, what were McCurry's first words to the packed briefing room? "Let's see, what do you want to talk about today...
...point came during a June 5 game in the central city of Gifu, when the burly Di Muro called two strikes on popular Chunichi Dragons slugger Yasuaki Taiho. Taiho didn't appreciate it much, and let Di Muro know it. Since American umpires take less guff than their Japanese counterparts, Di Muro tossed Taiho out of the game. That touched off a melee. The crowd jeered at the American, and coaches and players charged him. Taiho repeatedly shoved Di Muro in the chest. The end result: U.S. baseball officials called Di Muro home last week, while Taiho played ball...
...drawings, prints and sculptures at New York City's Museum of Modern Art has all the air of a cult event. This is not the fault of the curator, Kirk Varnedoe, who has done an exemplary job of hanging the show and, without resorting to the usual pseudo-philosophical guff that attends critical discussion of Johns, describing and analyzing his work in the catalog. Rather, it seems immovably built into the penumbra--glowing, and yet after all these years possessing the consistency of solid concrete--that surrounds the work...