Word: poof
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...instant jillionaires of the tech-stock IPO boom, pledging lavish gifts to charities and universities was a way of parading both their compassion and their clout. But with the tech bubble gone poof, many of those same promises are worth about as much as dotcom-stock shares. Cancel that new dorm...
...have no mandate to overinterpret. They are proceeding now by the metaphysics of Wile E. Coyote, who ventures bravely into midair, until he notices that he is standing on thin air above the deep canyon, into which, presently, he begins a long, whistling plummet that ends in a distant "poof!" on the canyon floor...
...year 2000 was not the best of times for tyranny. True, Saddam Hussein began to shake off the shackles of world sanctions, all the while restocking his arsenal with the nastiest of weapons, unfettered and unwatched. Against all expectations, however, Yugoslavia's strongman, Slobodan Milosevic, vanished--poof!--from power after calling an election he felt sure he'd win, and then failing to steal the result from a populace that rose up to guard its rejection of his troublemaking. Another autarch actually took a turn toward benevolence all on his own: North Korea's quirky Kim Jong Il reached...
...Henry Kissinger or Johnnie Cochran nearby to read the small print. For a start, you'll probably get only six; for another, Beelzebub has an impish sense of foul play that turns any wish into a curse. Ask to be rich, powerful and married to your dream girl and--poof!--you'll become a cuckolded drug lord. Say you want to be a star athlete, and you'll be missing some important jock equipment. Request a smart Satanic comedy, and you'll get this bag of old tricks...
...neck, they did what I had waited for them to do: They did not fluster and flap up splashily in the way that, say, ducks do when disturbed; rather, they did the loon thing - the magic act. One after another, they elegantly beaked down and vanished without a trace. Poof! Submarines indeed. They dematerialized; they passed miraculously into the universe below...