Word: sop
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...psychological quirks of the perpetrators. In Cool Breeze, the gang is given a vaguely altruistic motive (the money from the job will go to start a "black people's bank"), which once proposed is rapidly forgotten. Pollack's script uses this political ploy as a kind of sop, an attempt to make the gang not merely crooks but criminal revolutionaries...
Sister No. 2 is a never-was ex-starlet whose career died on the cutting-room floor. Her husband and an old Army buddy sop up beer and run through the great sports exploits of the past three decades, but she tries to grab the spotlight by doing the dance that audiences never got to see. This is a wickedly funny parody of a typical '30s-'40s Hollywood dance number, and Thompson does it so perfectly that 2,000 palms thunderclap...
Like men, she quickly discovered, chimpanzees are technological animals. They chew leaves to make sponges, which they use to sop water out of hollow branches. They also strip grass stems to make long probes, which they use to fish tasty termites out of their mounds. Jane also found out that chimps, long considered vegetarians, also eat meat. Like primitive humans, they form hunting parties and carry out fairly intricate plans to capture young bush pigs, monkeys, baboons-and even, she reports, human babies...
...though we might conduct a brutal war of aggression in violation of every principle of international law, we were still a nation which lived by laws and could not ignore evidence of crime. As Hammer says, "(The courtmartial) was, then, a show conducted for the world by Americans," a sop thrown to our conscience: "If, though, Calley were convicted, then at least a measure of blame would have been assessed and through his conviction there would be an acknowledgment, however small, that My Lai, and perhaps other, smaller My Lais, perhaps even the war itself, was indeed an unspeakable...
...elude him. Despite his strong showing in the primary, he faces an uphill fight to try to grab one of the nine seats on the council. There will be 18 names on the ballot in November. Six of them will be incumbents, and all of these finished in the sop nine in the primary: men like Chris Iannella, Frederick Langone, Dapper O'Neill, who have been running for office for years. It seems unlikely that any of them will stumble before November: no one in Boston is very happy with the City Council, but no one is very angry...