Word: whiz
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...heads a marginal enterprise that does legalized breaking and entering designed to test corporate security systems. His associates include a defrocked cia operative (Sidney Poitier); a gentle paranoid (Dan Aykroyd) who believes the same group that killed Jack Kennedy also framed Pete Rose; a blind computer whiz (David Strathairn) whose keyboard -- and Playboy -- are in Braille; and a kid (River Phoenix) who demonstrated his personal best when he illegally improved his grades in a raid on his school's mainframe...
Media coverage had already moved from its gee-whiz phase to the relentless scrutiny that new candidates always suffer. I've hired all you guys, Perot complained last month, and now I'm getting a lousy press. His way of dealing with that was to carp about criticism and Republican "dirty tricks" rather than take initiatives that command positive attention. In early July, with the campaign sagging, Jordan confronted Perot. It isn't working, the veteran told the novice. Unless you let us make some basic changes, I'll quit. Perot wished Jordan well and said he should leave anytime...
...certainly did; he was in fact a whiz-bang salesman for IBM and really did fulfill his annual quota for 1962 on Jan. 19 (by, he says, selling a single giant IBM 7090 computer). But fellow IBM salesmen from that period say the rest of the story is fantasy. IBM had no objection to salesmen earning more than managers, they say, and many did -- with the blessing of the managers, whose own incomes rose the more their salesmen produced. Moreover, they say, IBM was not so stupid as to deny itself revenue by forcing its best salesmen to sit idle...
...SOME DECADES NOW, THE eye-fooler William Harnett (1848-92) has been one of the most popular American 19th century painters. Everyone relishes the stories about his gee-whiz illusionistic skills and how they mesmerized Americans at the dawn of the photographic age a century ago, people less drenched in images and less blase about them than we. "So real is it," wrote a Cincinnati journalist in 1886 about a Harnett called The Old Violin, that a special guard "has been detailed to stand beside the picture and suppress any attempts to take down the fiddle...
...course, any modern fair is obliged to give frequent lip service to a kind of chipper one-worldism (110 countries have exhibits -- an all-time world's fair record!) and to environmental sensitivity (organizers planted 300,000 shrubs on the site!). Moreover, the gee-whiz, spick-and-span perkiness found in New York's Flushing Meadows in 1964 is strikingly evident in Seville. At any moment, one expects to see teams of Esperanto-speaking U.N. technicians in lab coats disembarking from Hovercraft to brief James Bond...