Word: tom
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...lately. First, the facts. Three weeks ago it was announced that nearly two-thirds of teaching candidates had failed a newly required competency exam. In the aftermath of that announcement, politicians had a field day, rushing to judgment on the test-takers and their college teachers. House Speaker Tom Finneran (D-Mattapan) denounced the test-takers as "idiots" and proclaimed college diplomas worth nothing more than a "used Kleenex that's been lying in the gutter." One wonders what school of civility our politicians attended...
Last summer, my first on this job, I read Tom Wolfe's "Bonfire of the Vanities." While reading the misadventures of Wolfe's Sherman McCoy, I searched for the real McCoy among the building's tenants. To my consternation, I could not label any one tenant "most likely to suffer a startling fall from grace after a hit and run accident...
Boys everywhere are frustrated, abused, and saturated with media violence. But not all of them live in places where guns are available. Says Tom Furth, a former lawyer for Mitchell Johnson: "In Jonesboro, there are little militia boys that have guns, and you have an environment that is particularly conducive to what happened. This would not have happened in Minnesota," where his ex-client was originally from. "Mitchell might have snapped there too, but in a different context." Mitchell's partner, Drew Golden, 11, was Arkansas-raised and had reportedly attended a militia camp in California...
Among the guests: John Travolta and his wife Kelly Preston, Tom Hanks, Steven Spielberg, David Geffen, Streisand's mother, songwriters Alan and Marilyn Bergman (the only invitees who knew the wedding date well in advance; all others were invited on short notice over the phone), "Tootsie" director Sidney Pollack, designer Donna Karan (who made the wedding dress), music producer Quincy Jones and composer Marvin Hamlisch, who conducted a 16-piece orchestra playing "Here Comes the Bride." Despite one L.A. newscast's report that Streisand's close friend President Clinton planned to cut short his China visit in order to attend...
...when he was still struggling to find his voice as a playwright, Tom Williams, 27, read a newspaper account of four inmates at a Pennsylvania prison who died after being left to roast inside a superheated chamber dubbed "Klondike." The story spurred him to expand a one-act play he had written about prison life to a full-length drama he titled Not About Nightingales. Williams entered the play in a contest for young dramatists held by the famed Group Theatre. (Since he was two years over the age limit, he lied about his birth date and signed with...