Word: odd
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Last fall the mountain known in Tibet as Chomolungma, or Goddess Mother of the World, and in the West as Everest permitted itself to be climbed by 33 people, withheld permission (in the form of benign weather) from a much larger number and killed nine climbers. Are those good odds or bad? A flatlander's question, an observer decides, after asking it of Stacy Allison and Peggy Luce; to mountaineers, the answer is a shrug. The odds are the odds. Allison, a contractor and house framer from Portland, Ore., and Luce, a bicycle messenger from Seattle, members...
...businessman whose idea of an O.K. vacation is to hang around his pleasant home in numbingly normal Hinckley Hills and be lazy. Let his wife (Carrie Fisher) and son go to their lakeside cottage; he'll just veg out, watch TV and keep an eye on those . . . well, darned odd neighbors who recently moved next door. These people talk funny; they don't socialize; they probably smell bad. So Ray and his friends will just, oh, break into the new family's house, dig up the backyard, wreck the basement and leave the place in cinders. They'll destroy...
...guests. In the Act is a wickedly funny send-up of android sci-fi, featuring a voluptuous male-fantasy robot (named, naturally, Dolly) who is much nicer than any of the humans around her. In the title story, an actress in a grade-B theatrical company falls for an odd, possibly psychotic lawyer who wants to use her in a complicated revenge and moneymaking scheme. Her only onstage talent is her ability to scream convincingly; at the end, she screams for real but also for a reason impossible to guess beforehand. Ingalls, an American living in London, has built...
Buried within the Bush budget is an odd change in policy: the President seems committed to reversing tax reform, the major legislative triumph of Reagan's second term. A reduction in capital-gains levies would erode the reform principle that earned and unearned income should be taxed equally. Bush also retains an unmistakable affection for the kind of special-interest tax breaks that the 1986 legislation was designed to curtail. The President has quietly asked Congress for $2.7 billion annual tax reductions for business, including $400 million for oilmen, who include some of Bush's most faithful supporters. In comparison...
...booking agent. He never went swimming with his three adopted sons. Though he became seriously ill, he never visited a doctor. Last week, four days after Tipton, 74, died from a bleeding ulcer in Spokane, a funeral director told one of the musician's sons the reason for his odd behavior: Tipton was a woman...