Word: rubes
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Thursday is a straightforward document that addresses anything-but-straightforward issues. Despite deep enmities, the parties have committed themselves to abide by "annexes" that fill more than 150 pages of typescript, and range from vague promises to "make strenuous efforts to cooperate with each other" to constructing a Rube Goldberg government with a bicameral legislature and a three-person executive presidency. "There's been a very obvious demonstration of the difficulties to come in the fact that many of the the Serbs in Sarajevo are packing their bags," says Graff. For details and an explanation of the major points...
...Hubble's innards was crucial. Even so, installation of a complex array of corrective mirrors--essentially fitting the Hubble with a set of eyeglasses--was a high-cost ($700 million), high-risk venture, and some astronomers were dubious. "They considered the whole thing to be rather a Rube Goldberg creation," says Spitzer. On top of that, the list of tasks assigned to the astronauts who flew the repair mission--not just installing the new optics, but replacing an outdated camera, two wobbly solar-energy panels and three faulty gyroscopes, among other balky components--seemed too long. "I don't think...
...Ronald Reagan sang the nightingale's song of patriotism and military pride and honor and sacrifice, a traditional American hymn of duty and manhood that Vietnam had silenced, or turned obscene. Timberg thinks three of the five men--North, Poindexter and McFarlane--got tangled up in the Rube Goldberg contraption of Iran-contra in part because the scheme (arms for hostages, profits going to the freedom fighters of Nicaragua) gave them back some of the lost notes, a snatch of the melody they had been denied...
Some have interpreted Oklahoma City as a kind of Reichstag fire, the rube militias being the embryos of an American Nazism. That is overheated; anyway, why go abroad for bad news? The real precedents are homegrown. Years ago, D.H. Lawrence, making his way through American literature, fell upon Fenimore Cooper's Natty Bumppo and pronounced, "The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer." A fancy line, but true only of a certain whip-mean conscienceless strain in the American character. It is not a bad description of the Oklahoma City suspect's eyes...
...York correspondent Adam Cohen traced DreamWorks' boldly unorthodox web of financing, from Wall Street, where Chemical Bank extended a $1 billion line of credit, to the West Coast, where the California Public Employees Retirement System was considering an investment. The closest Cohen--"a movie fan but a Hollywood rube"--had ever come to a movie studio was when he worked as a civil rights lawyer in Lafayette, Alabama, which had been used as a location for Mississippi Burning. Now here he was, having lunch with Ressner and the DreamWorks principals on the Universal...