Word: railroading
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...would allow unelected persons to be appointed to the Cabinet, opening the way for blacks in the government for the first time. But De Klerk had less success with a law giving amnesty for undetailed politically motivated crimes. The bill was vetoed by opposition M.P.s. De Klerk could still railroad the bill through his President's council, circumventing Parliament. But that, said the a.n.c., would only demonstrate his desperation to cover up the crimes of apartheid...
...high-speed trains like those in Japan and France, Amtrak would have to lay hundreds of miles of expensive track. Instead the railroad is testing this new fast train, the X2000, on loan from Swedish State Railways, which can use existing tracks. Wheels on opposite ends of each car that steer independently and a computerized hydraulic system that tilts the carriage let the train take curves at high speed...
...season premiere of Saturday Night Live in 1975 -- misfired when producer Lorne Michaels cut his spot from six minutes to one and Crystal pulled out. "It was awful," says Crystal. "Gilda ((Radner)) walked me to the elevator. I was crying all the way home on the Long Island Railroad, the tears running down the makeup." While friends Chevy Chase and John Belushi went on to become household names, he had to settle for a spot on ABC's wacky series Soap, playing television's first prime-time homosexual. Then came the ill-conceived Billy Crystal Comedy Hour in 1982, which...
...everything argued that such development would continue in the small, incremental steps that had marked the progress of much of the 19th century. Inventions like the railroad or the telegraph or the typewriter had enabled people to get on with their ordinary lives a little more conveniently. The news, in 1901, that an Italian physicist named Guglielmo Marconi had received wireless telegraphic messages sent from Cornwall to Newfoundland was hailed as a triumph, but few discerned its full meaning: the birth of a communications revolution. Rather, it was another welcome convenience...
...This accounts for the faint feeling of deja vu that even non- Magritteans sometimes get when looking at his work. Magritte died in 1967, but for the best part of a half-century his images -- or variants on them -- have been used to advertise everything from the French state railroad system and chocolates to wallpaper, cars and political candidates...