Word: hamming
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Stories that the U.S. is financing covert operations in Nicaragua play directly into the hands of the Sandinistas. They contribute to the widespread impression that the U.S. is as ham-fisted as ever in its approach to Central America, discourage Washington's remaining friends in the area and seem to justify the Sandinistas in seeking Cuban (if not Soviet) protection. Thus, the publicity may require the Government to review the feasibility of the operation, even though it could be validly considered a proper adjunct to U.S. diplomatic goals. Complained one high Administration official: "The leak was devastating." Indeed...
...classic study, Dr. Lot Page headed up a Harvard team that from 1966 to 1972 studied six tribes in the Solomon Islands. Three were totally unaffected by Western culture and three, otherwise very "primitive" (no roads, no telephones, no pollution), got to eat salt-heavy canned ham and beef jerky supplied to them by Chinese traders. Only in the second group did blood pressure increase with age. It was highest in the tribe that traditionally cooked its fish and vegetables in sea water. The tribes did not differ in weight or any other medically significant way. Says Page: "When...
...waiting in a long line at one downtown Warsaw supermarket. When shoppers there reached the white enamel butcher's counter, they found that the popular zwyczajna sausage had gone up from 40 to 190 zlotys (51? to $2.42 at the official exchange rate) per kg. A small canned ham had jumped from 200 to 600 zlotys ($2.55 to $7.75). A white-haired woman who had been hovering on the edge of the meat line turned away with only a loaf of brown bread in her wire basket. "I'm terrified," she confided. "I'm a widow...
...beyond distraction by the bizarre boorishness of the folks next door. For this to work in the movies it must be played either with the film equivalent of Berger's fastidious prose-Ordinary People in apocalyptic dead pan-or with the cauterizing fury of a Bunuel satire. A ham-fisted director like John G. Avildsen (Rocky) need not have applied. Nor were Bill Conti's services required: his score sounds like a Spike Jones symphony of klaxons, sassy trombones, Bronx-cheer kazoos and the Hallelujah Chorus. John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd maneuver through this minefield on literal flat...
Mobil, however, has been ham-handed in its efforts to buy another oil company. Some industry observers blame its failures on the insistence of Chairman Rawleigh Warner and President William Tavoulareas that they plan their own tactics without consulting outside advisers. Mobil lost out to Du Pont in the contest for Conoco by coming in with a low bid. Its initial $5.1 billion offer for Marathon in October was also immediately denounced as "grossly inadequate" by the company's president, Harold Hoopman. Said a leading investment banker: "If Mobil had bid $126 a share from day one, instead...