Word: slapdash
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...last month, spoke out against the host country's behavior in terms that the U.N. organizers could not quite manage. Without naming China outright, she delivered a rebuke to the way it denied perhaps as many as 10,000 visas to prospective delegates and quarantined the Huairou forum in slapdash quarters 30 miles north of the capital. As her audience thumped desks and applauded loudly, Clinton declaimed, "It is indefensible that many women in nongovernmental organizations who wished to participate in this conference have not been able to attend or have been prohibited from fully taking part...
Early on, the thing had a sweet, slapdash air. In 1933 Marian Bergeron, Miss Connecticut, was summoned offstage and a producer said, "My God, she's it!" She was handed a strapless white satin gown and told to take off her bathing suit and change--right there in the wings. Bergeron, now 77 but a decorous 15 at the time, refused: "So two chaperones built a little screen around me, and I put on the gown. Six boys and two girls put a gorgeous robe over my shoulder--it had a train half the size of our living room...
...Wilde once remarked that he had given his genius to his life but only his talent to his art. The same might be said of the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, only his life turned out to be a sad and sordid affair and his art was often no more than slapdash. As Patricia Morrisroe makes clear in her smart and readable biography Mapplethorpe (Random House; 461 pages; $27.50), the photographer's brief life-like his most notorious images-was not a pretty picture...
...well short of present needs. Only 3% of all households in Hyogo prefecture, which includes Kobe, were covered by earthquake insurance. Even people who can afford to build a new home are likely to be stymied at first by a moratorium on postquake construction, a policy intended to avert slapdash projects and allow time for possible new building-code and zoning strictures. In Kobe's case, officials were thinking about extending the normal two-month delay to as long as half a year...
...chiefs close to Yeltsin, beginning with Defense Minister Pavel Grachev, was foolishly optimistic. In the early stages, Grachev, an arrogant airborne commander, boasted that a regiment of paratroops could clean up Chechnya in two hours. Perhaps believing his own sloganeering, he ordered the army into action with only a slapdash plan and hastily assembled forces. According to some reports, no experienced general would take command of the operation...