Word: shark
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...around the time that greed got dropped from the list of the Seven Deadly Sins, the informal first-wives club gave way to a marketplace ethic. In magazines, books and movies, a new trophy wife was viewed as one more perk for the corporate shark, career-enhancing proof that his manly takeover skills weren't limited to the boardroom. After all, wife No. 1 was old-think, a mom-and-pop store in an age of mergers and acquisitions. Wife No. 2 by lavishly spreading the shark's money around to hospital and museum boards, was soon lionized...
...then, who wants to hike past a sign saying YOU ARE ENTERING CHIPMUNK COUNTRY? In South Africa people pay to get lowered into the brine in a shark cage, just for the thrill of cringing as the great whites go leering by. Maybe it's character building to be reminded that we aren't the only predators on the planet, that we're pretty puny ones, in fact, compared with those that do their meat-processing without the aid of metal implements. Maybe, if there were no bears to cull the human population, the wilderness would be overrun by AARP...
...years later, he painted The Gulf Stream, moving this apprehension from animal to man. A black sailor lies on the afterdeck of a dismasted sloop, adrift and rudderless in the deep Caribbean blue. Enormous sharks circle the boat. Their ominousness is reinforced by the zone of black water from which they rise. (The catalog, rather absurdly, suggests that celibate Homer was invoking that hoary phantom of the Freudian couch, the vagina dentata. This could make sense only to an art historian who has never been near a live shark.) On the horizon, a square-rigger sails indifferently...
Scientists are finding lots of surprises. The facial bones and teeth of the tyrannosaur-topping dinosaur, it turns out, are the same as those of a rare species, called Carcharodontosaurus saharicus ("shark-toothed reptile from the Sahara"), which were found in Egypt in the 1920s but destroyed during World War II. The new skull not only establishes the animal's size but also proves that the huge dinosaur had a comparably huge home range that spanned all of North Africa...
...departures last year of the agency's shrewd, ruthless chairman, Michael Ovitz, and its charismatic president, Ron Meyer. Both men left for studio jobs--Ovitz to Disney, Meyer to MCA. They took with them the agency's aura of invincibility and its ability to inspire fear in the Hollywood shark pool. Rivals, long resentful of the agency's No. 1 status, are smelling blood in the water...