Word: stiffs
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...family's elderly Chinese maid, with disastrous results. When his father gets into a minor road accident, an angry mob gathers - until Martin, then 9, stuns everyone into silence with a burst of newly acquired Cantonese obscenities. Yet the innocent idyll has a villain: Booth's father, a stiff, cocktail-swilling prig who denigrates the locals and mocks the boy's affection for "going native." The elder Booth "was a natural-born bully," writes his ever-upbeat son. "On the other hand, I did grow up mixing a mean cocktail." The heroine is his mother - spunky, intelligent and curious about...
...presidential candidate, hear the best rhetoric an opposition party had to offer or gawk at Beltway celebs. Often, it seemed just being in the corridors abutting the floor of the Democratic National Convention (DNC) was enough. Certainly, it was enough to spur a healthy trade in the many-colored stiff paper passes which granted varying levels of convention access to their bearers...
...challenge Burrough faces in writing about people like Nelson and Kelly is that they've gone thin and stiff with age. "After decades spent in the washing machine of popular culture," Burrough writes, "their stories have been bled of all reality." Burrough strips the comic-book glamour off those cardboard villains and gives them back their grit and power to shock. We learn that Nelson was a tiny blond sociopath whose viciousness frightened even his pals. "Pretty Boy" Floyd--Charley to his friends--was a Dust Bowl farm boy. Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow come off as greedy, murderous children...
...Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania in a few days with his son Wade, then 15, and he needed some good, strong hiking boots. Horrified by the customer's naive, if not dangerous, lack of preparation, the sales staff urged him to, at the very least, break in the stiff boots during the flight over the Atlantic. Edwards did not confide another problem, for which there is no known equipment solution: he's afraid of heights...
...euro-zone economies. A study by economists at the European Commission shows that a 1% vat cut could boost the economies of major E.U. nations by about 0.5% - or more than double the impact of a similar-sized reduction in income tax or corporate taxes. But the idea faces stiff opposition. Better Budgets Jon Blondal says it's no coincidence that nations currently running budget surpluses, such as Canada, New Zealand, Finland, Sweden and Australia, also happen to be the ones that have modernized and reformed their budgets. "The process is key," says Blöndal, an Icelander who regularly...