Word: poofs
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...post"-anything is, by definition, confused and dangerously overextended, like Wile E. Coyote after he has left the cartoon plane of solid rock and freezes in thin air, then tries to tiptoe back along a line of space before gravity notices and takes him down to a little poof! in the canyon far below...
...Poof! I woke up. It was just a dream. Relieved, I ran to my desk and pulled out my wallet, checking its contents. Yep. Just enough for a big chicken salad jumbo...
...natural disaster. Deliberate book burning seems not only criminal but evil. Why? Is it worse to destroy a book by burning it than to throw it into the trash compactor? Or to shred it? Not in effect. But somehow the irrevocable reduction of words to smoke and, poof!, into nonentity haunts the imagination. In Hitler's bonfires in 1933, the works of Kafka, Freud, Einstein, Zola and Proust were incinerated -- their smoke a prefigurement of the terrible clouds that came from the Nazi chimneys later...
...each other's gleaming indignation. Not a molecule of coherent information emerged from the encounter -- except the encounter itself. The medium is the message, in Marshall McLuhan's famous dictum. Bush afterward compared the exchange to combat, but if so, it was the combat of Saturday morning cartoons: Bang! -- Poof! Boom! -- Poof! Language disintegrated on impact. When Bush slugged Rather with the line about Rather's once walking off the set of the CBS Evening News, the anchorman looked for an instant like Wile E. Coyote when, gimlet-eyed, he understands he is about to plummet into the abyss...
...School; no more angry scuffles in the History Department. Simply take the TSAT score, multiply it by 2.4364, add to the result the number of books the person has written, multiplied by 2.4567 if the reviews were favorable or by 1.3546 if they were unfavorable, and you have--Poof!--the candidate's "tenure index." A person with an index over 1800 wins, someone below 1775 loses, and anyone in between will be subject, alas, to further discussion since the test does, of course, have its limits...