Word: fiendish
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...anonymously returned several days later, legislators and police laughed off the thievery and no one was ever charged for the crime. As a result, the Lampoon’s members obtained an outlaw reputation that they felt obligated to refresh every so often by committing new, even more fiendish pranks. By contrast, if the police had obtained search warrants to invade the Lampoon Castle, carted off evidence, and arrested Lampoon staff, future members likely would have been too fearful to commit another prank for years...
...with its whole history," he says. "We only live with the stories we choose to tell." In Hall's blackly comic and underrated Hitler (2000), these stories now include a mustard gas-blinded future F?hrer who staggers off an Illawarra and South Coast Steamship Company boat in 1919, making fiendish fun of "the fact, universally acknowledged, that nothing ever happens in Australia." With his finely fervent fiction, Rodney Hall proves that...
...freedom after Mao Zedong's death. There was a propaganda onslaught against the Gang of Four--the quartet (including Mao's wife Jiang Qing) that was blamed for the Cultural Revolution, the decade of terror that Mao had unleashed and then nourished. Mao didn't count among the fiendish four, but when the plucky Chinese I encountered talked of the Gang, they would hold up five fingers, then fold the thumb back slowly to conform to the official co-conspirator count. The message was clear: Mao was that disappearing finger...
From this unappealing premise Author Patrick Süskind, 37, spins a tale as energetic and engaging as it is improbable. Immediately after giving birth, an unwed mother dumps her unwanted infant into a pile of fish offal, amid the "fiendish stench" of the nearby Cimetière des Innocents in Paris. Unfortunately, the baby's screams attract the attention of the police. They arrest the mother and hand her progeny over to church authorities, who baptize him Jean-Baptiste Grenouille. The tyke's wet nurses keep quitting. He drinks too greedily, they complain, and there is something else truly spooky about...
...mere 61 points and 23 countries later, America’s 15 year olds failed to edge out the Spanish by only two points. And, moreover, America’s national test scores continually improve while America drops in comparison with its peer countries. Was this just some fiendish European plot to make its American neighbors look like blockheads with a screwed-up educational system...