Word: whim
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...last chance" refers to House and Senate pressures and the specter of hearings and legislation. Then "baseball will have lost control of its own problems," warned Ueberroth, a concern to everyone who holds the laws of the leagues dearer than the laws of the land. Purely by congressional whim does baseball remain set off from all the other professional sports as being somehow special. While the National Football League suffers, and generally loses, one antitrust suit after another, major league baseball enjoys an antitrust exemption...
...since pets are only human, some owners have rather hairy stories to tell. Fred was out taking Omar his ferret for his daily walk and passed the room where the Opportunes were rehearsing. On a whim, he put Omar through the open window. "One guy saw him and started screaming and then they all started screaming, so there were 10 people screaming at once," he recalls...
...which could have held 40 people, departed with only twelve. While John Jacob Astor went stoically to his death, Henry Sleeper Harper managed to find lifeboat room not just for himself but for his Pekingese, Sun Yat-sen, and an Egyptian dragoman he was bringing home on a whim. Benjamin Guggenheim changed into evening clothes for the occasion, and so did his valet. "We've dressed in our best," Guggenheim said, "and are prepared to go down like gentlemen...
...John Fowles credit for bravery. A Maggot, his seventh work of fiction, is an unusual and consciously risky book. The title alone may discourage the curious (and give booksellers the willies). In a brief prologue, Fowles explains that he is using the word maggot in the obsolete sense of whim or quirk, but that won't help matters much. And what will readers make of such Fowlesian whims as building his plot around questions to which he never provides the answers? Or resting his conclusion on an assumed familiarity with the Shakers, that little-known sect of puritanical Protestants...
...police is arbitrary. "I have found the Cambridge police to be unworkable," says Hunsberger, who no longer plays his guitar on Cambridge streets. "It's up to the police to enforce the rules and it depends how they feel that day. I don't want to be under their whim...