Word: prankishness
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...eerie sensation to read Jane Smiley's prankish new novel, set in pre-Civil War Kansas, after campaigning with the fiery abolitionist John Brown through the same time and terrain in Russell Banks' thunderous epic Cloudsplitter. The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton (Knopf; 448 pages; $26) follows Lidie, a sturdy young Illinois bride, to the dust-blown outpost of Lawrence, Kans., in the tumultuous year of 1855. Lawrence is a raw, ill-favored roost of newly arrived Free Soil settlers, jostled by drunken proslave irregulars from Missouri and protected, mostly with words, by gassy politicians. John Brown...
That gets to the core of what may be the Net's biggest problem these days: too many powerful software tools in the hands of people who aren't smart enough to build their own--or to use them wisely. Real hackers may be clever and prankish, but their first rule is to do no serious harm. Whoever is clobbering independent operators like Panix has as much to do with hacking as celebrity stalkers have to do with cinematography. Another of the victims was the Voters Telecommunications Watch, a nonprofit group that promotes free speech online. "Going after them...
...locals, but his goofy optimism is mostly gone. Part of it is perspective, of course; he and the other Haight-Ashbury kids were looked on by their elders as nihilistic and futureless a quarter-century ago. Now he's an elder, not quite a senior, but no longer a prankish sophomore...
...revolving around Letterman. His new TV incarnation represents more than just a change of networks and an earlier bedtime; it marks the ascendance of a new generation. When Late Night with David Letterman made its debut on NBC in 1982, it was the prankish outsider, a subversive send-up of talk shows, television, the entertainment world in general. Letterman refused to fawn over guests; with the help of Vegas-obsessed bandleader Paul Shaffer, he took deadpan aim at show-biz phoniness. He griped about his NBC bosses, turned stagehands into stars, conducted elevator races in the hallway. His medium-twisting...
...audience knows it is in for an offbeat experience as soon as the first character appears, sporting an elephant's head. This is Ganesha, the Hindu god who embodies childish playfulness, zest for life and prankish humor. During the course of almost three hours, he appears in countless guises across a tourist's landscape of India, as a Japanese husband and later his wife, as a street peddler, a beggar and a leper, not to mention moments of high-spirited invisibility when he is simply a god. He attaches himself to two suburban American matrons, old enough to be grandmothers...