Word: pruning
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...coordinate and streamline the world's biggest purchasing program ($160 billion a year). A federal grand jury is expected soon to indict up to a dozen defense contractors, consultants and former Pentagon officials for fraud. Moreover, budgetary pressures will force the nation's No. 1 shopper to prune as much as $400 billion from purchases over the next five years. One indication of how difficult the job can be: Richard Godwin, the first man to hold it, quit after only a year...
Politics and patronage go hand in hand, but some presidential appointments in the next administration may be hard to fill. The nonpartisan Center for Excellence in Government catalogs them in The Prune Book, a just released guide to 116 of the toughest jobs in the capital. Some examples: a former Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs admits that sometimes "stamina was more important than intelligence" in keeping pace with the travel and social demands of his post. At the Office of Management and Budget, the challenge is "not to cave" in to demands for money. Says a former...
...directory, a takeoff on the traditional "plum book" of political patronage, has a serious purpose: to stress "the consequences of failure to perform effectively" in sub-Cabinet Government offices. Explains former State Department spokesman John Trattner, who wrote the book: "A prune is a plum with experience...
Like many gardeners, I am rather a bungler. I know very little about pH soil tests. I think I know how to prune a rosebush, but the rosebush may think otherwise. I learned from my father the basic rules of mulching and thinning -- how to stake out the tomatoes, how to make the peas climb up the chicken wire, how to bind up the raspberries -- but the techniques that worked in the fertile hills of Vermont do not necessarily work in the sands of Long Island. Most important of all, I do not have the time (or the energy...
...very deep wrinkles. It does not help sags or bags or very loose skin. People who need a face-lift are not going to get any benefit." Dermatologist Jerome Shupack of New York University School of Medicine puts it more bluntly: "Retin-A won't do much for a prune." Indeed, some physicians wonder about the popularity of the drug at all. "The only thing I see Retin-A doing is irritating the skin and increasing the susceptibility to sun damage and thus to skin cancer," says Dr. Carl Korn of the University of Southern California Medical School...