Word: stings
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...BUYERS? The rise of this illegal commerce suggests that there are serious bidders out there. But there is no evidence indicating who they are. Three of the four samples of weapons materials that turned up in Germany were purchased by undercover agents in sting operations designed to trap the sellers or their couriers. Indeed, in the Bremen episode, the defendant's lawyer claims that his client too is a police operative. There have been rumors in Germany, but no proof, that the 6 grams found in May were acquired for a foreign government, possibly Iraq or North Korea. In fact...
There was jubilation in conservation circles last month when a newly formed U.S. Park Service antipoaching unit pulled off a classic sting operation, arresting 27 citizens from Texas to Florida in the biggest poaching bust in Park Service history. The feds posed as amateur herpetologists and would-be buyers; the crime ring's alleged kingpin, who regularly carried a semiautomatic pistol, gave up without a fight. The Park Service carried out the operation for only...
...best thing about these movies is their acrid sting. They say the Eisenhower years were too complex to be remembered as just Hula-Hoops and hair grease. And that is fine with us old '50s types. When nostalgia is true, it hurts...
...very reliability prompts us to find ways to domesticate it. Some of us try to take the sting out of mortality by talking of "passing away" or going to "the Great Dugout in the Sky" (while doctors, who have to deal with it daily, refer, even more coolly, to "coding" or "circling the drain"). Others try to romanticize it as the great escape, the best anesthetic outside of Prozac. Those who cannot countenance any hope in the world find it the ultimate (indeed!) confirmation of their grimmest fears. Death, after all, is the only reality that never lets you down...
...transforming acute, intuitive perceptions into sentences. Writing, this is called. Alice, half cracked, notices an overweight townswoman: "Her partially exposed freckled bosom, confined in its pushup bra, was barking and whining to get out." She slaps a hostile child: "He had absorbed the blow. It was as if the sting had gone right to a spot inside where he stored his wounds." And here is Alice's tiny daughter putting a clammy hand on her arm and trying to console her: "When I was your mom and you were a baby, I beed sweet and nice." This is very good...