Word: outlandish
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...plot is as lovably ridiculous as it always was. There is the priggish hero whose outlandish sense of duty has tied him to a pirate gang. (His father had sent him off to become a ship's pilot; his nurse, being hard of hearing, mistook "pilot" for "pirate" and apprenticed him to brigands instead.) There is the pretty girl he falls in love with, and her father, "the very model of a modern major general." And there are the cowardly police, led by Tony Azito, and the pirates, so inept and soft-hearted that they will spare anybody...
Into this desiccated shell of a man blows an outlandish wind of salvation, a rickety truck full of outcasts who make the Joads seem like landed gentry. Duck Bexley is the woebegone father of a brood of five; his wife Elizabeth is pregnant with the sixth. Bexley earned his name from a father who thought that trouble fell off him as water off a duck; in truth it clings to him like fresh tar from a hot summer road. In Korea, he won a Bronze Star for annihilating 44 Chinese trapped in a ravine. Their ghosts haunt...
Deep in Brazil's Amazon jungle, thousands of dust-covered laborers swarm over a mountain of red earth, using their pickaxes and shovels to carve its surface into a bizarre landscape. It is a scene that could belong to an outlandish biblical epic movie or a sinister labor camp. It is neither. Serra Pelada (Bald Mountain), 270 miles south of the mouth of the Amazon River, is the site of one of the biggest gold rushes in modern Brazilian history. It is also an experiment by Brazil's debt-ridden government to harness the skills of the country...
...polishing his convention acceptance speech and sharpening his attack on Republican Candidate Ronald Reagan, Carter was poring through tedious White House telephone logs, appointment books, memos, documents and his personal daily diary. His ignominious task: preparing yet another report on his dealings with Brother Billy's outlandish escapade as a foreign agent for the radical Arab state of Libya. Conceded Robert Strauss, the President's shrewd campaign director: "It's sad and tragic and debilitating." Added Strauss: "I'm not a Billy man. I've had about all of Billy I need...
Joshua loved Hollywood and its confident hustlers. On a previous visit he had delighted in spinning through the canyons in somebody else's Mercedes, gearing down to consider the more outlandish mansions, each garden perfect. He liked to wander through the unbelievably opulent men's shops on Rodeo, startling the prissy clerks.by bargaining. He enjoyed the tanned, trim, middle-aged producers on health diets, toting scripts to market in Gucci attaché cases, even as their East Side grandfathers had once carried sewing machines on their shoulders. They strutted into the Polo Lounge or La Scala or Dominic...