Word: pretended
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...problems that make its collapse inevitable, but unemployment has never been one of them. Mao Zedong's promise of the "iron rice bowl" was the traditional communist guarantee of full employment. However decrepit the economy might be, everyone would always have a job, no matter how economically redundant. You pretend to work and we pretend to pay you. And yet on Friday, even as portraits of Mao were driven through the streets of Beijing, 100 million Chinese face the prospect of joblessness with no social safety...
...glad Alan E. Wirzbicki ("Bleeding-Heart Conservatives", Sept. 24, 1999) read the cover story about Harvard conservatives in the current Harvard Magazine. For the record, the article "doesn't even pretend to be objective." It is a signed, personal piece of writing, just as was, for example, Andrew Tobias's "Gay Like Me," the cover story for January-February 1998, an account of the experience of being homosexual at the College and elsewhere in the University...
...there's a strange twist to the attention the media has lavished on conservative students and faculty lately. For the most part, they deal only superficially with the substantive political issues setting conservatives and liberals apart. Instead, the theme of the Harvard Magazine article--which doesn't even pretend to be objective--is that conservatives are Harvard's newest minority, a group of students stifled by a dominant liberal orthodoxy. We're supposed to come away from the article believing that at Harvard, conservatives are somehow being oppressed...
Perhaps if Bochco were the "token" in question, he would feel differently. I'm not an actor, and I don't pretend to understand that craft in particular, but my guess is that just as in any other line of work, actors like to think they've been chosen for their merits, not to offset someone's guilt or cover their bases...
...that weren't news enough, I also found out that Green Bay Packers quarterback Bret Favre shaved his legs for the upcoming season. These are real men, men who have been knocked unconscious by 300-ft. linebackers and married women who starred in sitcoms that they had to pretend were funny. I did some research and found a survey by Coherent Medical Group that shows that 54% of women find excessive body hair the most bothersome male trait, while only 25% chose love handles. This made me happy, because while shaving my body seems kind of gross, I really hate...