Word: astonishes
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1990
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...baseball will come to Oakland again this October. The fans -- a little jaded but forever immature -- will cheer their favorites with Bay Area gentility, punctuated by the occasional "Rip it, dude!" Triumph will satisfy but not surprise them; only failure will astonish. The A's know this. As they enter the play-offs, they know their true opponents are not the Blue Jays or the Red Sox, the Pirates or the Reds, but the great ghost of baseball history: the '27 Yankees, the Philadelphia A's of '29-'31, the Yanks of '49-'53, the Oakland...
There is indeed. It is a system that punishes eroticism with an X rating, yet rewards violence -- from rape to dismemberment -- with an R. Each new violent movie, like this summer's Total Recall, wants to astonish jaded audiences with its special-effects audacity. But adult sexuality, even when investigated as discreetly as it is in Henry & June, is deemed objectionable. "You can cut off a breast," says Kaufman, "but you can't caress it. The violent majority is dictating to a tender minority...
...know it's Gorbachev. Who else could it be?" How many times we have heard those words in the past few months from friends and colleagues -- even a few competitors -- trying to guess our annual secret. While the choice of the Soviet President may not astonish many readers, one aspect of the decision was a bigger secret than usual. Among ourselves, we referred to it as "the D factor." Instead of naming Mikhail Gorbachev Man of the Year for 1989, we decided to designate him Man of the Decade. The only precedent for such a departure from the Y word...