Word: pompousity
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...saintly aura that decades-old newsreel film seems to lend the athletes of a bygone era, there is still enough magic left in Kahn's writing to draw the reader into an account of the "new" game. Each chapter is an absorbing vignette, a lucid illustration rather than a pompous explanation, a group of baseball stories rather than sports theories...
...leading to a different conclusion. The revolutionaries, after kidnapping the Mayor of San Francisco and demanding ransom, have holed up in--you guessed it--Alcatraz. Harry and partner arrive, and after an extended gunfight and hide-and-seek game the only survivors are Harry and the Mayor, a pompous, self-serving fool. As he dusts himself off after his brushes with death, the Mayor promises Harry that "There will be a letter of commendation in this for you." Harry drops the bazooka with which he has dispatched the last kidnapper and walks ever so slowly back to the side...
Voinovich's Kievstone cops approach seems anachronistic. But the jabs are rapid and effective. Krasnoye is a model of petty bureaucracy populated by the pompous, the incompetent and the foolish. A self-proclaimed scientific genius and follower of Lysenko, named Gladishev, for example, devotes himself to creating a hybrid plant that will grow potatoes underground and tomatoes above. He also believes in excrement as a wonder vitamin that could benefit mankind if only people would overcome their squeamishness. There are send-ups of education, collective farms, newspapers, law enforcement and party organizations. Voinovich's definition of an official...
...pathology" rationale: the structural impetus toward black unemployment that has long plagued the U.S. economy. Contrary to Moynihan's pompous suggestion, blacks can hardly thank "the healing powers of the democratic ideal and the creative vitality of the Negro people" for any success they have gained in the past 15 years. Rather the Gutman book testifies that creativity prospered long ago in the "living space" provided by antibellum slavery. It may have been after slavery that blacks had to struggle to keep that adaptive spark alive as doors to Northern skills and skilled jobs slammed shut. An "unidentified 38-year...
Composed on the heels of HMS Pinafore, The Pirates of Penzance is one of the best known of the Gilbert and Sullivan canon. The show has very little dialogue; there's nothing here, for instance, to rival the verbal pyrotechnics between the two peers in Iolanthe or the pompous flatulence of Poo-Bah in The Mikado. Pirates' fame derives rather from its score, which is a typical G&S mix of rousing chorus numbers, patter songs and take-offs on Italian grand opera...