Word: quickly
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Your book includes an index of more than 500 invented languages, though you're quick to point out that no one really knows how many there are. How did you decide which languages to explore? I knew more about the famous ones, like Esperanto and Klingon. But the others I discovered in libraries. Every library you go into will have these little pamphlets self-published by some dreamer with a plan. I got very curious about the lives of the people who devoted themselves to these doomed projects...
...Last night, under new rules designed to stop this type of bloc voting, 50% of the points were awarded by the traditional public phone-in and 50% by a panel of music producers in each country. Advocates of the new jury system will be quick to say it helped Norway transcend borders - with a mix of fans and more objective industry experts voting, Belarus, Latvia, Lithuania and Russia all awarded Norway the maximum 12 points, thereby snubbing one another. But since Eurovision has no plans to reveal which national juries voted for which countries, its actual effect is difficult...
Szabados is quick to acknowledge, however, that not all the money has been well spent. There was the housing development built in a hurry in a wooded area south of town that now stands largely empty. "If we'd thought about it properly, we wouldn't have done it," she admits. Then there are the government-sponsored job-creation programs that failed to live up to their name, and the startups that quickly shut down again because they depended more on government subsidies than on a smart business plan. (See pictures of the global financial crisis...
...Commerce, thinks that was a crucial error. The true value of the old East German mark was just one-fourth or one-fifth of the West German currency, so when it was swapped in 1990 at parity, the competitiveness of the local economy took a nosedive - compounded by a quick doubling of wages in the east following reunification later that same year. "There was a revaluation by a factor of eight. Which industry anywhere could swallow that?" Haimann asks, pointing out that some of Germany's eastern neighbors, including Poland and the Czech Republic, managed to hang on to many...
...press tends to gauge papal trips on more concrete terms. (It's hard to confirm, for example, whether the Pope's prayers are answered.) On the way to board the papal plane, I began a quick - and necessarily insufficient - "grading" of Benedict's trip. There was not a vast range of marks, with the Italian press generally being more positive, a German reporter giving the Pontiff a C-minus for his much criticized remarks at the Holocaust memorial Yad Vashem), and one veteran concluding that John Paul would have been much more inspiring at these events. (See pictures...