Word: pleasers
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...zoos fight back, they are pulling along the public with some shrewd tactics. Conservationists often select an irresistible, oversize crowd pleaser -- pandas are perfect, but snow leopards and black rhinos work fine -- and lead a campaign to preserve the creature's habitat. "There is a utility in the concern for the giant panda," says the National Zoo's director Michael Robinson. "Pandas are relatively stupid and uninteresting animals. But they happen to be photogenic and appealing, and they help focus people's attention." Big animals need big swatches of habitat, and so in the process a lot of less sexy...
...particular crowd pleaser for Rhein was an observation about airplane bathrooms. "When you're going to the bathroom on a plane, here's a question, where does it go?" Rhein asked. "If it's staying in the plane, whose luggage is it next to?...`That used to be a blue suitcase,'" he quipped...
...running film clips. But the print critics are hardly relevant to Hollywood. They may be able to help a small film, but they can't break a big one. "You always want a happy Friday," one studio exec says of critical raves. "But if the movie is an audience pleaser, it can overcome bad reviews, especially in the summer. People aren't walking in out of the heat to get art. They're looking for diversion...
Father Joe is short, overweight, too fond of food and especially of drink; he is no crowd pleaser but no fool either, a traditionalist, competent and at the same time numbed by routine. Like many a middle-age professional man, he has problems with the home office (obstructive tactics by the chancery, presided over by Monsignor "Catfish" Toohey, a despised rival of Joe's since childhood), with his clients (an overbearing parishioner who wants to buy his child's way into the church school) and with his territory (blatant boosterism for the suburb's tacky shopping mall, dominated...
Complaints ranged from the mundane to the exotic. One crowd pleaser was Vladimir Kabaidze, 64, general director of a machine-tool plant in the city of Ivanovo. Earthy and outspoken, Kabaidze took pleasure in skewering the ministerial bureaucracy that oversees Soviet industrial enterprises. Kabaidze offered some feline advice: "If a minister can catch mice, feed him. If he can't, don't bother." He also denounced the bloated cadre of "scientific workers" who are designated to carry out state-supported research-and- development projects but actually perform little productive labor. "I recently heard a horrible statistic," he told the conference...