Word: tracings
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...with a fat telescopic sight, the gun fires a toxin-tipped dart, almost silently and accurately up to 250 ft. Moreover, the dart is so tiny-the width of a human hair and a quarter of an inch long-as to be almost indetectable, and the poison leaves no trace in a victim's body...
After three pitchers of beer, Briggs and I drive to Ketchum that night. Fred sleeps in the back. It is a long, desert road. Cars are few and I trace their rear lights back to nothing in the sideview mirror, where they are but a pin-pricked rupture in the great sack of night, a bleeding stream of fleeting electricity. I push the van to 95 in the soundless onrush of blackness, while the flourescent stakes by the roadside teeter rearward and empty lights hang nowhere out in the desert, some mystery of some nuclear facility...
...something of a tradition at Exxon that the men who reached the top jobs there could trace their careers back to more or less rough-and-tumble beginnings in the oilfields. That was certainly true of big (6 ft. 2 in.), craggy, Canadian-born John Kenneth Jamieson, Exxon's chairman since 1969, who started out in the oil business in the 1930s as a laborer in a small refinery in Calgary, Alberta. Last week's announcement that Jamieson, now 64, will retire on Aug. 1 signals a subtle change in style at the colossus of the major...
...people who create all those tunes about broken hearts and long lonesome roads. One suspects that what attracted Altman and Tewkesbury to C. & W. was both its audience ("These are the people who elect the President," a political advance man comments early in the film, with just a trace of disdain) and its tradition. Country-and-western basically dresses up folk music in rhinestones and spangles, making hay out of Americana. A lot of it is slick and sweet, and its sanctimony can curdle the blood. Altman used the music like a continuing, slap-happy dirge...
...woman living alone in an unidentified city, finds herself existing in a kind of end-time-an apocalypse disguised by understatement. Other tenants are quietly abandoning her apartment building, joining the migrant tribes that suddenly appear, briefly camp, and just as suddenly move on "to the East," leaving no trace but the marks of bonfires on the pavement. Machines no longer work. The electricity is off. Water sells by the bucket and good air is beyond price. Only the bureaucracy goes on, still fussing about regulations as if nothing has happened. Bureaucrats, the government and the press are contemptuously referred...