Word: houdini
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Yasser Arafat, the Houdini of Middle East politics, appeared ready to perform yet another remarkable feat. Last year the chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization managed to escape from Beirut with more than 6,000 of his commandos after the Israelis had captured a third of Lebanon and surrounded all of his positions. This year Arafat and his loyalists had held on for three weeks in the vicinity of the northern Lebanese port city of Tripoli as a vastly larger force of P.L.O. rebels, strongly backed by Syria, tried to drive the Arafat faction into the sea. The chairman...
...nonsense." Not long afterward, Novelist Samuel Butler decided that "if ever a spirit-form takes to coming near me, I shall not be content with trying to grasp it, but. in the interest of science, I will shoot it." Exposes began to play the vaudeville circuit: Magician Harry Houdini showed audiences that the mysteries of spontaneously moving objects were no more than sleight of hand and, sometimes, foot. The Fox sisters, one of them by now a hopeless alcoholic, finally confessed that the strange rapping had been done by manipulating their big toes...
During weeks of sold-out preview performances, Henning bolstered the show with with more effects than he could shake a wand at. Many of them had never been seen since the days of Houdini and Blackstone; none has ever been performed so adroitly. Even fellow magicians gaped at Merlin's entrance in a five-inch bubble that mysteriously expanded to life size before the wizard emerged. The other illusions were no less astonishing. On center stage, Debby instantaneously vanished...
...voice have an interesting effect in songs such as "Keep It Open," where she sounds like several different people. But the harshness becomes irritating in the beginning of "Night of the Swallow" and grating when she reduces her voice to a croak in certain parts of "Houdini...
Eleanor Belmont, a former actress and wife of Millionaire August, hired Houdini to be handcuffed, bound with ropes and chains and dropped overboard from the family yacht, merely to divert some friends. Toward the end of her career, she was heard correcting the upright novelist John P. Marquand for his lack of taste and reticence...