Word: piker
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...comparison with what some Far Eastern countries pay defectors, Uncle Sam is a piker. Early this month, when a lowly antitank gunner, Corporal Kwon Chong Hun, 20, defected to Seoul from North Korea, he was celebrated as an "antiCommunist gladiator" and given the equivalent of $20,000. Seoul also provided him with free housing and his choice of a college scholarship or free farm land. He received several job offers. An association of Seoul businessmen whose ancestors came from Kwon's home province is trying to find him a bride. Observes Kwon, understandably: "My decision to defect...
...single year. HEW has the third largest budget in the world, outranked only by those of the U.S. Government and the Soviet Union. Its spending roughly equals that of all 50 states combined. The department goes through $500 million every day. By comparison, the Pentagon is a piker's operation (1979 budget: $118 billion). That fact alone indicates how American priorities have changed...
...Troyens' music is at once delicately concentrated and surcharged with an agitato inner flame. It is as short-winded as Mozart and as elongated as Wagner; rarely does Berlioz repeat himself, yet he spins out one duet (Cassandra and her lover Coroebus) for 15 minutes. Never a piker in such matters, Berlioz made heroic stage demands that included hunters on horseback, ships sailing out of a harbor, a stream that turns into a "roaring waterfall" and, of course, a large wooden horse...
...really a pleasure," he once said grandiosely. Allende impressed visitors as a crisp administrator. He was a hard man but not a ruthless one. An American diplomat who knew him remarked that "when it comes to leaning on people to do something, Allende makes Lyndon Johnson look like a piker...
...awaits this seedy relic of past elegance. The lobby is a kind of limbo where the remaining tenants relate or display their past falls from grace. In The Time of Your Life, Saroyan gave us one whore with a heart of gold, the luminous Kitty Duval. Wilson is no piker. He gives us three: Martha (Trish Hawkins), April (Conchata Ferrell) and Suzy (Stephanie Gordon). Martha is a lost, innocent child, April her caustic Eve Arden-type sidekick, and Suzy the dumb one. It testifies to the durability of the goodhearted-prostitute cliche that audiences can still...