Word: swelled
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When Jim Thompson died in 1977, he was broken and damn near broke. Not one of his 29 novels -- tough stuff with titles like Savage Night and A Swell- Looking Babe -- was in print. He had fiddled on the fringes of Hollywood, helping to write Stanley Kubrick's The Killing and Paths of Glory, but found no steady work. His one solace was booze, in punishing quantities. No wonder the typical Thompson antihero was a smart guy who got outsmarted by fate, fast company or himself...
...looks as clean as a Hockney landscape -- and its juicy performances. Huston and Bening, sure shots for Oscar nominations, make for two splendid carnivores; they both have scintillating street wit and legs that go on for days. Cusack, as the would-be lion tamer, naturally gets devoured. And a swell sight it is too, a mother consuming her young, for the same reason a mama scorpion does: she's hungry. That's Jim Thompson's world, and now Hollywood is welcome...
...mechanism that only helped skew the market. The Australian Wool Corporation, a quasi- official body, bought all unsold stocks at a guaranteed price. When natural fibers became the fashion rage of the late 1980s, the AWC lifted the price by 71%, to $3.35 per lb., which encouraged farmers to swell their flocks. So dominant was Australia in the fine-wool market that its minimum price kept the stuff expensive amid overproduction and shrinking demand. One result has been a turn by Japan to improved synthetic fibers, which are smoother and more lightweight than their forerunners...
...recent years a ground swell of breast-cancer victims, feminists and legislators, inspired by the success of the AIDS lobby in bringing attention and funds to that epidemic, have been pushing for better regulation of mammography standards, for mandatory insurance coverage of mammograms, and generally for more research into the still mysterious roots of breast cancer. They point out that the U.S. government spends only $77 million a year investigating ways to prevent the illness, against $648 billion on heart- disease prevention. Last week Congresswoman Mary Rose Oakar of Ohio sought to redress the shortfall by introducing a bill that...
...taxpayers' revolt of the 1980s. Proposition 13, the 1978 referendum that froze property taxes at 1% of assessed value, depleted county treasuries, leaving the state to pick up the bills for things like schools and welfare services. Now California faces a $1.5 billion budget gap that is expected to swell to $6.5 billion by 1994. Incoming Governor Pete Wilson is refusing to rule out the possibility of higher taxes. But he also wants more freedom from constraints imposed by the state constitution and voter initiatives and laws that earmark much of the budget in advance for such purposes as education...