Word: shrewd
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...personal fortune (usually estimated at more than $20 million, including land, cattle, airplanes, banks and radio stations). But mostly he devoted himself to his 330-acre ranch, occasionally helping to lay pipe in the middle of the shallow Pedernales and gradually building up his cattle herds through shrewd trading at local livestock auctions. He would come home at ten in the evening, tired and dung-booted, to tell his guests about the price of beef and about egg production problems. "He's become a goddam farmer," an old friend complained. "I want to talk Democratic politics. He talks only...
...Hammer went on to make more millions manufacturing beer barrels, distilling whisky and raising cattle. In 1956 he retired to California but got restless; the next year he bought control of Occidental, then a company with sales of only $274,000. Through a combination of luck, brass and shrewd management, he had built the company by 1970 into a behemoth earning $175 million on sales of more than $2 billion. Major factors in the rise: oil strikes in California and above all in Libya (one on land that Mobil Oil had abandoned because it produced nothing but dry holes) along...
This is a movie of missed opportunities; something very shrewd, pointed and telling could have been made about the man who began as a hard-driving rock star and became a sort of spangled mascot of Middle America. There is plentiful material here for social satire, the sort of thing the National Film Board of Canada did so nicely in their lacerating documentary on Paul Anka, Lonely Boy. Elvis might also have made a subject for a diverting visual essay on the sociology of pop. The filmmakers, who are responsible for the easygoing Joe Cocker documentary Mad Dogs and Englishmen...
...Liberal representation in the 264-member House of Commons from 146 to 109. The Progressive Conservative Party won 107 seats, the Quebec-based populist Social Credit Party took 15, and independents have two. The remaining 31 seats-and the balance of power-belong to the N.D.P., led by shrewd former Labor Lawyer David Lewis. As long as the N.D.P. supports Trudeau on key votes, his government will survive and another election will be delayed...
PETE 'N' TILLIE are Walter Matthau and Carol Burnett, two lonely San Franciscans gingerly approaching middle age. After a whimsical and rather winning courtship (the movie is at its best here, sweet and shrewd and funny), they settle down into suburbia. They have a boy named Robbie, bright and happy, who contracts a mysterious disease and dies before reaching adolescence. The marriage founders, breaks and is mended again. Based on the Peter DeVries novella Witch's Milk, Pete 'n' Tillie is a mixture of puns, wisecracks and tragedy. All this might have worked...