Word: thumbprinting
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...updated version of the TV show Mission: Impossible, special agent Jim Phelps no longer gets his top-secret instructions by merely opening an envelope and listening to a tape recorder. These days Phelps puts his right thumb on the special pad of a black box that, after reading his thumbprint, promptly pops open and gives a laser-disc video presentation of his next assignment. No one but Phelps can open the box because no one else has his thumbprint...
...exact morphology, and it works against clear, taxonomic definition. This builds a layer of frustration into the image: it seems perverse to take objects that are only, or mainly, of scientific interest and handle them in a way so calculated to frustrate scientific curiosity. The dandy's thumbprint lies lightly on this show, a sign that both Johns and Marcel Duchamp have been there before, one with his puzzling equivocations between things painted and things named, the other with his mock- scientific glosses. But this is no bad paternity for an artist to have, and the slightly skittish intelligence...
...over the fields, the mower clattering, breaking down at least twice a day. The old man stomped and swore. He nicked his hands replacing sharp steel teeth. The hayrakes followed his mower, his sons turning the dried hay into neat, continuous piles that looked like whorls of a huge thumbprint." A mother lays down the facts of life as immutable laws: "There's a lot more to life than the kind of love you mean. . . There's children and dogs and a garden to water. There's having a house and all the things that go with...