Word: poison
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...press is in the business of selling, and good deeds don't sell. What does sell is gloom and fear and crime and deceit. The press can poison a jury fast. Often, there is a rush to find guilt. Along the way, they deprive defendants of any presumption of innocence. There's a conscious effort to go after anyone big. The only place John De Lorean could get a fair trial would be in a monastery with twelve deaf-mute monks. There's a tendency to overexpose our leaders. Anybody who wants to be a public figure...
...Vaticana bibis, bibis venenum," wrote the Roman satirist Martial in the 1st century: "Drink Vatican and you drink poison." Martial was writing of the wine produced in the neighborhood, which at the time was more famous as the site of the Vatican Circus, where Nero threw Christians to the lions after the great fire that swept Rome in A.D. 64. On such engaging historical notes opens The Vatican (Abrams; 398 pages; $60), a book that will do much to fill in the fragmentary picture that even dedicated travelers take away from this tiny (108 acres) yet labyrinthine city-state. This...
...smash, the last scene features a Quayle-turned-manic-killer on one side of May's door "...with his muzzle-loading revolvers, knives, lengths of cord, gas chambers, doppelgangers, poison-bearing pins" versus a group of friends sitting on a couch, smiling encouragingly, waving brightly-coloured plastic baseball bats." It is here that Pesetsky's wisdom lies; rather than offer epigram, dogma, or role model, she generally keeps her characters' lives firmly within the Barnum & Bailey's that is their natural sphere...
...group's success is almost as wild as the opera poof masquerades of its lead singer, Boy George. Consider: three Top Ten singles from Culture Club's first album, Kissing to Be Clever, which sold more than a million copies; a fourth, fresh single, Church of the Poison Mind, already snug at No. 11, with another, Karma Chameleon, ready to take off; and a new album, Colour by Numbers, storming the LP charts...
Shady fortune hunters, as Heineken knows, find such figures irresistible. In 1980 three extortionists threatened to poison cans of Heineken beer unless they were paid more than $1 million. Their plot was foiled. Nonetheless, another would-be crook tried the same ploy last August, demanding $3.3 million. Some of the policemen who thwarted him were entertained by Heineken in his office on the day of his disappearance...