Word: laid
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...loan from the teachers' credit union. Last year his company did $100 million in sales, with 152 franchises worldwide. Jim Whitman, the executive vice president in charge of recruiting franchisers, finds his best clients are refugees of the old order: the middle-aged managers and blue-collar workers laid off by corporations obsessed with efficiency. He scoops them up (as long as they "love pets and like people--in that order") and turns them into managers of pet and pet-product stores. He's convinced that his business is perfectly timed. "People are getting back to basics, doing something real...
Computers as we know them will never have minds. No matter what amazing feats they perform, inside they will always be the same absolute zero. The philosopher Paul Ziff laid this out clearly almost four decades ago. How can we be sure, he asked, that a computer-driven robot will never have feelings, never have a mind? "Because we can program a robot to behave any way we want it to behave. Because a robot couldn't mean what it said any more than a phonograph record could mean what it said." Computers do what we make them do, period...
...combination lean-to and trailer that was designated the "embassy compound." Thus, shortly after 4 p.m. on Saturday, with barely the pretense of extraterritoriality, Rick McLaren, self-declared "ambassador, consul-general and chief foreign legal officer" of the separatist Republic of Texas, ended his 6 1/2-day standoff against America, laid down 10 rifles and hundreds of rounds of ammunition, and agreed to a cease-fire. In a nod to protocol, the plenipotentiaries who negotiated the agreement--otherwise known as the Texas Rangers--watched as the separatists ceremonially arranged their arms in a circle...
While they do their exercise, they become mine. Write what they look like: 15 young people in jeans, sweatshirts and sweaters, bodies hooked over a white sheet of paper, pursuing memories, dressing them up and watching to ascertain that their hands are following their instructions. The flower is laid aside on the desk, its work done. The students are off now like hounds. They follow the scent to funerals, weddings, proms. One girl will remember lying in the night grass under a blue moon with her little sister. Another will recall a last dance with a midshipman in Navy whites...
...first novel, Dreaming in Cuban, five years ago, Cristina Garcia laid authoritative claim to the hearts and elemental souls of Cuban women, their dreams, their zany ways, the "anxious moonlight" inside them; in the process, she won a National Book Award nomination and a devoted following. Now, in her second novel, The Aguero Sisters, (Knopf; 300 pages; $24), she extends her domain to the whole history of the island across this century, and the "aura vultures" and "Batista hawks" and "siguapa stygian owls" that flit through its heavens, above all the political upheavals and reversals. Indeed, not the least...