Word: whizbangs
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Nutty? Kooky? Surely, but that's what America is all about in Don DeLillo's White Noise. This book is a paradox: unrelentingly frivolous, its moribund satire of our techno-whizbang pop culture is ultimately depressing. White Noise swirls with the sounds of contemporary life--televisions, radios, appliances, sirens. The Babylon inhabited by DeLillo's samaritans is awash in information, sensation, and objects of diversion but everyone's so numb they don't mind, and they adopt a fusty capitalist attitude respecting their decadence. As one character earnestly asserts. "It makes you proud to be an American: we still lead...
...ambitious 7% growth goal for this year "appears within reach." At the same time, the rate of inflation has fallen from a 1974 high of 21% to a manageable 4%. Yet simultaneously, there is a slowly dawning consensus among Japanese leaders and businessmen that the good old days of whizbang, export-led growth are numbered. Indeed, go-for-broke Japan is now retrenching for a new era of go-slow growth, in which gross national product is expected to expand at about half of its former clip...
...Roosevelt "the greatest President of my time," respected Dwight Eisenhower, was dazzled by John F. Kennedy and never did like Richard Nixon. "If you live long enough, people confuse ability with longevity," says Strout. "I'm just an analytical writer with some color. I'm not a whizbang...
...Along Comes Mary" by the Association: "Desire is the fire in the eyes of chicks whose sickness is the games they play.") promises a big stick production, easy to follow, fun to see. Desire isn't easy to follow. Without resorting to gimmicks--superimposition, fast motion, slow motion, whizbang lab work--director Tim Hunter manages to sideswipe crusted habits and expectations of perception, daring us to see just a little more than we see. Let me introduce a critical term, a metaphor, a clue for everybody. This is a marijuana movie, Mary Jane on a magical mystery tour...
After Edward M. Gilbert's daring 1958 takeover of the E.L. Bruce Co., a leading manufacturer of hardwood products, Wall Street figured it would be hearing a lot more from the 34-year-old financial whizbang. What it heard was not exactly what had been expected. One day in 1962 Gilbert in formed Bruce directors that he had used $1,953,000 in company funds in a futile effort to cover heavy stock losses. Then he boarded a plane for Brazil. Returning voluntarily four months later, Gilbert has since lived a life that belies his onetime jet-set status...