Word: varnished
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AFTER LENDING Ronald Reagan's presidency an unusually long immunity from criticism, the media has recently begun to strip its coverage of the varnish that had shielded the President for more than a year. His sputtering economic policies, increasingly apparent insensitivity on civil rights, and vacillating foreign policy-largely shot from the hip-have even made Reagan's admirers begin to reel in disbelief and exasperation. That the press had treated the President with kid gloves, while fully aware of the White House's blunders incoherence, and incompetence now seems a particularly irresponsible error. But at least journalists are finally...
...inherited from his father; he eventually bequeathed it to one of his four sons. He was squirishly indifferent to many of the conventional social graces; his wife even more so. He served martinis mixed with Argentine vermouth. They were, one visitor recalls, "about the color of spar varnish." The President liked wild game and carved it expertly, so admirers regularly sent him venison and antelope and partridges, but Eleanor squeamishly banished such things from the White House table. Her own specialty was to cook and serve Sunday-night scrambled eggs, which one survivor recalls as "undeniably discouraging...
...charming novel addict named Ludmilla, also known as the Other Reader. In the course of tracking down clues, the readers interview a senescent professor, an editor of a publishing house who talks like a rejection slip and a confirmed nonreader who glues books shut and applies a coat of varnish, thereupon producing pop sculptures...
...First commercial varnish...
...them. A Northeast Louisiana University student, Arden Chapman, caught in his mouth a grape thrown the longest distance-259ft. It is easy to understand the performer's urge to do the improbable, the difficult, the unique, the best. Claiming a record, any record, provides massage to the ego, varnish for the pride and a tic of celebrity. To hold a record, in the words of Allen Guttmann, professor of American Studies at Amherst College, "is a uniquely modern form of immortality...