Word: ruses
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Mazursky films: well-intentioned, articulate neurotics whose comic behavior exposes their internal pain. Unfortunately, Ross has a tendency to sacrifice believability for broad gags. We are asked to accept, simply for farcical purposes, that Franny's otherwise bright parents (John Lithgow and Kathryn Walker) would pull an elaborate ruse to fool their child into thinking that their dead marriage is a happy one. Ross not only characterizes Jamie's father (Terry Kiser) as a desperately hip playboy, she must also give him a bachelor pad so overdone that even Hugh Hefner would find it garish. Jamie...
...Feds are not the only losers. In states where sales taxes are high, avoidance schemes abound. The simplest ruse is the empty-box trick. The customer buys a big-tag item, such as an expensive suit or shoes and makes a deal with the merchant to "mail" it to an address in a state with a lower rate. The merchant obligingly sends an empty box, and the customer walks out with the goods. A variant is to send the purchase to a friend in another state. Rob, an accountant, saved $600 on a $12,000 painting by having the gallery...
...they even discovered two microwave radio towers alongside the bay. Far offshore, the U.S. Navy maneuvered four destroyers in a manner designed to scare Cuban radar operators into thinking that a massive Normandy-style landing was under way. As it happened, Castro had no radar capable of detecting the ruse...
...triumphed over at tempted invasions, coups and assassinations. He has felt confident enough to send troops to Africa to stir up trouble. Yet he has now been taken, in a huge swindle brought off by a group of men accused of selling Cuba a cargo of nonexistent coffee. The ruse, involving transactions from Canada to the Caribbean, ultimately collapsed, but not before Cuba was relieved of about $8.7 million-perhaps the worst sting the Cuban dictator has ever suffered...
...discovery near the English hamlet of Piltdown, the curious fossil with the humanlike cranium and the apelike jaw was believed by many anthropologists to be the long-sought "missing link" between man and ape. But in 1953, after application of new analytic techniques to thefamous skull, the ruse was finally revealed: the Piltdown man, as the fossil was dubbed, was a fraud. It consisted of nothing more than fragments of modern human skulls mingled with portions of a contemporary ape jaw with teeth doctored to give them the appearance of antiquity. As the years passed, scientists abandoned hopes of ever...