Word: performancy
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...respectability of a wedding license, and now she was to achieve it. She wore a black taffeta afternoon dress with two gold clasps at the shoulders. A minor party official with the coincidentally appropriate name of Wagner (Hitler's favorite composer) was brought in from his militia post to perform the brief ceremony. As the law prescribed, both bride and groom swore that they were Aryans. Wagner signed the marriage certificate, glanced at his watch, saw that it was just after midnight and changed the date from April 28 to April 29. Then they all had champagne and liverwurst...
...satellite might have failed because a hooklike "trigger" that projected from its side was not fully engaged. NASA officials agreed, but would not permit any of the Discovery team to leave the ship to work on the crippled satellite. The officials decided it was too dangerous for astronauts to perform unrehearsed work between objects as large as the rotating LEASAT and the shuttle, especially since the satellite's rockets were fueled...
...payment on $6.7 billion in tax refunds that people would have otherwise received and probably spent. At fault is the most expensive and sophisticated computer system ever used to sift through America's tax returns: eleven Sperry 1100/84 machines. Each computer has 8 million characters of memory and can perform up to 8 million operations a second...
...illusory savings of its own. For instance, more than $3 billion in deficit reduction for 1986 would supposedly come from curtailing the practice of contracting out to private industry such services as security and cleaning for federal buildings. The House, defying decades of experience, assumes that the Government could perform these functions far more cheaply itself. "Baloney," scoffs Congressman Delbert Latta, ranking Republican on the House Budget Committee. A committee staffer concedes that the figure was reached not after careful study but by "aneducated guess...
Against this background of gentle murmurings, Author Barry Hannah, 43, persists in making rude noises. Captain Maximus, his sixth book and second collection of stories, is full of spite, rage, booze and unregenerate boorishness. Not one of Hannah's two-fisted protagonists or narrators would perform well at a dinner party or charity bazaar. They resist gentrification. They hang around in scuzzy bars, wallowing in anarchic musings: "I thought of my books, my children, and the fact that almost everybody sells used cars or dies early. I used to get so angry about this issue that I would drag policemen...