Word: matters
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...There is a tendency when one is very confident to be verbose," he explains. "It's a matter of discipline." Verbosity is also a dodge for anxious politicians who lack thoughtful things to say. Nonetheless, the Vice President's newly restored confidence seems genuine. It is based, he says, on Bush's strong support of him and on his age: "I'm going to have time to cast the true identification of Dan Quayle out to the general public." In five months as Vice President, Quayle has demonstrated to fellow insiders that he is an effective Administration operator...
...Jake LaMotta was featured in every pretty piece on the passing of Sugar Ray Robinson, he might have been taken for an elder statesman of boxing, a figure of charm and standing. As a matter of fact, when Robinson made a Spanish omelet out of LaMotta in 1951, the New York Herald Tribune called it "the first believable knockout of ((Jake's)) life." LaMotta swears he never took a dive except the one against Blackjack Billy Fox, and that was so long...
Denny McLain, the Detroit Tigers pitcher, had a delightful alibi for two mashed toes that cost the 1967 pennant. He said he hurt himself shooing a raccoon away from a garbage can. Whether the raccoon had a Mob connection was a matter of speculation, but McLain was definitely the garbage can. When his bookmaking sideline was uncovered, he blurted, "My biggest crime is stupidity." Actually, it was just the thing at which he was most accomplished...
...left, Gorbachev responded somewhat evasively to a question about the Berlin Wall, calling it "no great problem." He repeated the standard East German position that the Wall could be torn down when the conditions that created it have disappeared. But even if Gorbachev were open to discussion on that matter, he would face certain resistance from East Germany, which opposes most of his liberal reforms. One measure of Gorbachev's standing in East Berlin: press coverage of his trip was consistently minimal...
...visual curiosity, but of all modernist movements the one that interested him most was symbolism, which reached its height around 1890 under Mallarme's leadership and which, through its effect on Matisse and others, lay at the very root of 20th century art. For the symbolists, art was a matter of evocation, not description...