Word: pitchman
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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After centuries of bad p.r., Death has a media strategy. And its chief spin doctor is named Kevorkian. He's too demonic to be an ideal pitchman. When he bent over Youk with a syringe and asked, "Sleepy, Tom?," the image was bloodcurdling. But he has an unerring sense of what excites journalists--and incites prosecutors. Three days after the 60 Minutes story aired on CBS, Kevorkian got what he had explicitly wished for: he was charged with first-degree murder. Though he has been acquitted three times of helping patients end their life, this time he crossed a significant...
Start with the pain. 'Cause we all know pain is what makes things funny. So start with the hurt, back when comic-actor-author-ad pitchman Chris Rock was li'l Chris from Bed-Stuy, just another black kid from a poor black neighborhood bused to another poor section of New York City because the school there was mostly white. Go back to the white kids spitting on him, week after week, calling him n______ this, n______ that, picking fights. And poor white kids, he says, are tough. They're not like your suburbanized white kids; they got all this...
Through such fans Jordan has, according to FORTUNE magazine, added $10 billion to the economy. What makes him a perfect pitchman for absolutely anything (Nike, Gatorade, McDonald's, Oakley, Rayovac, WorldCom...) is that he wins. While his skills were once those of Baryshnikov, age and triple-teaming defenses have grounded him. So, like Sinatra after he lost his crooning voice, Jordan, with delimited skills, developed an even better game. Through practice, his fadeaway jumper, passing and defense are twice as good as when he started in the league. During the last seconds of the play-off series with the Pacers...
...most memorable character: Rockefeller's father, William Avery Rockefeller, a backwoods mountebank and snake-oil pitchman whose history John D. tried to suppress. "Big Bill" Rockefeller, crack shot and con artist, claimed to be a medical doctor and, in the gullible towns of upstate New York and farther west, promised to cure any cancer for $25. Eventually, "Doc" Rockefeller (who made a habit of impregnating the servant girl at home) became a bigamist and started a separate family as "Doctor Levingston"--the name that appears on his tombstone. All his life, Big Bill loved money, and when...
...Project to Promote Competition Innovation in the Digital Age, a group of Microsoft rivals that will pursue its lofty goal by urging the authorities to sue Bill Gates' pants off. ProComp, as it's called, will have help navigating D.C.'s treacherous lobbying shoals from ex-Senator and Visa pitchman Bob Dole as well as from such heavy hitters as ex-Federal Trade Commissioner Christine Varney, ex-FTC general counsel Kevin Arquit and Powell Tate, the p.r. firm headed by Carter White House vet Jody Powell and onetime Reagan aide Sheila Tate...