Word: smarted
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...music market where size is everything and obscurity means irrelevance, Arlo Guthrie--as one would expect from a subversive, pot-smoking smart-ass--breaks the rule. Nobody listens to protest folk anymore and if anyone does, it's for the kick of nostalgia rather than ideology. Arlo Guthrie is, indeed, obscure now: a figure more of recent history than of present radio play. But he knows it. He knows it, he reacts to it, and he second-guesses the embarrassment that might come from being long past one's prime. He mocks his own obscurity with a comedic sense sharper...
...five points range from allowing consumers to disconnect air bags to requiring that a new generation of smart bags be phased in beginning with the 1999 model year. Martinez says the agency has been logging up to 500 phone calls a day from worried drivers and passengers who want to shut off or disable the safety devices. "When we take the time to explain how to use them properly," he says, "the vast majority [of callers] regain their comfort with air bags." However, the recent spate of publicity has taken its toll on public confidence. Declared a bystander outside...
...harmony ends there, however, because Detroit is likely to resist the proposal for smart air bags. Automakers insist that elaborate systems tailored to the weight and position of each occupant would be difficult to engineer and test, and could add as much as $600 to the cost of each vehicle. But just as in its earlier opposition to air bags, Detroit may learn to live with all that extra trouble--and so too may the driving public...
...puppy-dog skins, still employs variously addled henchmen to work her will and is still thwarted by the combined wit of what appears to be most of the Britain's fauna. For us dog saps, it is especially nice to see cuddlesomely real pooches instead of drawn ones doing smart-pet tricks. Fans of the high-diva mode will doubtless feel the same about Glenn Close's Cruella. In (creepy) flesh and (chilly) blood, the character is more fun for grownups than she was as an animated abstraction of evil...
...Tarzan plot in reverse--a very smart ape on the loose in London--is the most promising of the novel's inharmonious elements. Erasmus is an enormously powerful and intelligent ape of a species not yet discovered by human beings. He is captured and examined by a set of arrogant English zoologists. The wife of one, an alcoholic and depressive Danish beauty named Madelene, foggily sets a rescue in motion. Woman and ape then swing off, Tarzan and Jane fashion, to live in the treetops of a nearby zoological garden. London, in the middle distance, stands...