Word: joke
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...appearances and mining speeches or other documents, a ghostwriter with the need for speed may enlist transcribers and fact checkers to expedite the process. But in the end, how quickly the book gets finished depends largely on the ghostwriter's drive to grind it out. "My friends used to joke about, I think it's Control plus F10 - [the computer shortcut that brings up] the word count," says Barbara Feinman Todd, who ghostwrote Hillary Clinton's 1996 best seller, It Takes a Village, among other books. Jenkins, meanwhile, recalls months of pumping out 40 pages a week for Armstrong...
...trying to explain the worsening security situation on the roads, a British contractor recounts a joke that Afghans love to tell about themselves. It goes something like this: Alexander the Great was marching across the Hindu Kush mountains on his way to India over 2,000 years ago. The Greek had heard that Afghan tribes had fierce fighters, so he dispatched part of his force through the northwest, which was supposed to be the easier route, and led the remainder of his army straight through the middle of the Hindu Kush. The commander who had gone through the northwest, expecting...
...What was true 2,000 years ago is still true today," says the contractor as he finishes the joke. "If you want to get through the mountain passes, you fight or you pay." Like most contractors interviewed for this article, he preferred to remain anonymous because the U.S. and NATO have understandably strict rules about paying bribes to the Taliban, since that cash can in turn be used to buy more arms for fighting U.S. and NATO forces. NATO observes a "Don't ask, don't tell" policy on such payments. "We know that sometimes the contractors pay bribes...
...CinemaScore poll of exiting moviegoers and by a sheaf of favorable reviews. One dissenter in the critical community, Manohla Dargis of the New York Times, wrote that "the piles of bodies at the end did make me flash on the Nazi extermination camps, which, you know, really killed the joke, too." What do you bet that somebody in Hollywood scanned the Dargis review and got the bright idea of casting Breslin in a remake of The Reader for tweens...
...specialty buzz was for Paranormal Activity, a Blair Witch-y haunted-house thriller that reportedly scared the pants off Steven Spielberg. Paramount has been showing it in college towns the past two weekends, asking viewers to vote online if they wanted the movie shown more widely. Shot for a joke-small $15,000, Paranormal has already earned $780,000 on just 33 screens. That's a frighteningly good haul, and guarantees a broader release - perhaps in time for Halloween...