Word: record
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...prove everybody wrong: "Academically, he continued to lag, and various members of the faculty implied-or said outright-that he would never amount to anything. The athletic coaches disagreed: the following year Bud won letters in track and football, finished first in the school decathalon, and set a record by doing one thousand straight push-ups. He might have done more, but a teacher, worried that the youth would strain his heart, ordered him to stop...
...squabble triggered a marketing epiphany. Figuring that pub-goers would be grateful for a record book that settled debates and bar bets, Beaver created one. In 1954 he tapped a pair of brothers for the task: Norris and Ross McWhirter, who ran a London fact-finding agency. The idea was to distribute the book free of charge to bars in a ploy to generate publicity. The first edition, first titled the Guinness Book of World Records, debuted in 1955. It was a hit. Some 50,000 copies were reprinted and sold; demand proved so high that the book went through...
Over the ensuing decades, the book became a phenomenon, selling more than 120 million copies in 37 languages. The McWhirters were stringent fact-checkers, often traveling long distances to adjudicate whether potential-record holders met the book's standards. (Ross McWhirter was assassinated in 1975 by the IRA; Norris McWhirter quit editing the book in the mid-1980s). Record holders receive certificates from Guinness, though not all records are selected for inclusion in the book, which receives some 65,000 record claims every year. Rights to the book, which has evolved from an almanac into a glossy, hard-cover item...
...with their heads in the sand / Trying to make some sense of what they don’t understand / Waiting on somebody just to give them a hand.” Within just a few lines on the opening track, the central vision of Travis’s new record, “Ode to J. Smith,” is made painfully clear: man is alone, confused, and just desperate for a little help from his friends.And in the beautifully (but bleakly) rendered world that Travis crafts, he will wait and wait and wait. In the words of lead...
...Despite the bashing they had received in the campaign from John McCain for being soft on Russia, Obama and his advisers decided not to push back against Medvedev. They issued no statement on the record or on background about the Medvedev announcement. Instead, Obama politely returned Medvedev's congratulatory Nov. 8 phone call and laid out for his Russian counterpart his own view of the U.S.-Russia agenda. Aides say Obama and Medvedev discussed substantive issues in the call, but missile defense didn't come up. The Russian President responded positively to Obama's understated reaction. "The Russians were very...