Word: legerdemain
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...March). The domineering mother Enid (Beatrice Arthur) has a tongue with the sting of a killer bee. The 17-year-old son Paul (Brian Backer) has a sky-high IQ and plays truant to go to magic shows. Abysmally lonely, he retreats to his room to polish his own legerdemain, as Allen's boy figure did in the film Stardust Memories. Running into a flyweight booking agent (Jack Weston), Enid wheedles him into auditioning Paul. Terrified, the boy flubs a few tricks and becomes ill. In a total tangent, Enid and the agent embark on a bittersweet mating waltz...
...development; moreover, they appear unable to develop long-range problems of chronic inflation and soaring energy costs. And why has quality been declining? Partly because U.S. professional managers have cared less about what they produce than about selling it -and less about selling than about bookkeeping and tax-law legerdemain and building conglomerates that sometimes fall in ruins. "For much of the trouble of the American economy," says Akio Morita, chairman of Sony, "American management has to take the responsibility...
...before they are due. He also puts major purchases on his credit card, but then pays the bills in full as soon as they arrive. Says he: "This way I get 45 days of free credit." As long as interest rates remain in double digits, such feats of financial legerdemain may be some of the most innovative and productive work done in the American economy...
...operating procedures of Marxist states usually follow a depressing logic. Marxism, with its incomparably oafish legerdemain, softens up the sanity by explaining that failure is success, and otherwise fulfilling George Orwell's expectations. The revolutionary "vanguard" clearing the way for the dictatorship of the proletariat develops into a "New Class" of privileged party officials and bureaucrats. The system runs by what the Soviets call blat- influence, clout, corruption. A new minority rule sets in. If it is not the dark, satanic will of Stalin, it has little to do with workers' wishes either. Although members of the ruling...
...make sense out of the monetary muddle, Blaylock interviewed more than two dozen members of a club he calls "the world champs of legerdemain-economists and bankers." Blaylock is thoroughly qualified for the assignment. He has a graduate degree from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and another from the London School of Economics. It was at Johns Hopkins in 1971 that Blaylock first encountered Volcker, then Treasury Under Secretary for Monetary Affairs. Volcker had been asked to address the students on the future of the dollar and gold in the international monetary system. Blaylock recalls that...