Word: plan
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...When Sam MacDonald graduated from Yale in 1995, he didn't go chasing after his dreams. He went chasing after booze. And drugs. And food. By 2000, he weighed nearly 340 pounds and owed thousands of dollars in taxes, student loans and credit-card debt. Cue the "Urban Hermit Plan" - a wildly dangerous scheme to subsist on little else but lentils and canned tuna. MacDonald's memoir recounts the unexpected journey he took, morphing from "Fat Bastard" to "Urban Hermit," taking his readers from Baltimore to Bosnia and back again in a tale of "starvation, hard work and blind luck...
...birth of the "Urban Hermit Financial Emergency Rotgut Poverty Plan": While the rest of his fellow Yale alums enjoyed high-profile jobs and piles of cash ("It was the nineties, dammit, and they were getting rich. Just like everybody else"), MacDonald did his best to shirk responsibility - including his tax-paying duties. After several IRS agents came calling to collect nearly $2,000 in back taxes, MacDonald began to ponder questions like, "In basic animal terms, what does it take for a human being to survive? Maybe I didn't need to swallow up half of the Rolling Rock...
...fragile internal security has been entrusted to a 1,500-strong contingent of U.N. police and an International Stabilisation Force made up of 920 Australian and New Zealand troops. As part of the security program, the U.N. and the East Timorese government signed a Reform, Restructuring and Rebuilding plan to regenerate the PNTL...
...plan entailed a comprehensive screening process to remove those involved in the violence, followed by a six-month mentoring period for officers, a five-day training course and later a firearms certification course. Ninety-five per cent of the force has now undergone retraining, and in the New Year the first districts are expected to be returned to PNTL control as Australia withdraws 100 of its troops. Assuming the force meets certain benchmarks, the East Timorese government intends the PNTL to be responsible for about 70% of the nation's security...
...Felix the Cat became the first official parade balloon. Macy's filled the rubber animal with helium but didn't have a plan for deflating it when the parade was done, so Felix was just released into the air. He popped, of course, so the next year officials released balloons again, but incorporated release valves designed to let the helium leak out slowly over the course of a week. The balloons' release received much publicity; Macy's claimed that they would float hundreds of miles away from New York before landing softly in fields or people's yards. Stitched into...