Word: hangman
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...knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, Dr. Johnson said, it concentrates his mind wonderfully. Journalism's fortnight is upon us, and I suspect that 2009 will be remembered as the year news organizations realized that further rounds of cost-cutting would not stave off the hangman. (See the top 10 magazine covers...
...Nobel Prize-winning Irishman contains testimony from, and about, people guilty of a long list of particulars, most particularly being born. They solemnly declare all crimes of commission and omission, which Beckett sets down in crystalline phrases that might be spoken from the witness stand, or from the hangman's platform just before execution...
...night of Sept. 10, general Sultan Hashem Ahmed was prepared to die. He had written his will and left instructions about where his body should be buried. All that remained was to wait for his appointment with the hangman. At the gallows, there was extra security to thwart any rescue attempt, a senior Iraqi official tells Time. After all, Hashem was no ordinary criminal. Saddam Hussein's last Defense Minister had been condemned to death by an Iraqi court for his role in the slaughter of thousands of Kurds. Like his former boss before him, Hashem was held in Camp...
...with the idea for Jeopardy! - a game show that supplied the answers and asked contestants to come up with the questions. (A jack-of-all-trades, he even wrote the theme music for the "Final Jeopardy Answer" as well.) A decade later he invented his own version of hangman, creating the most successful game show in TV history, Wheel of Fortune. As usual, his involvement with the show was total; friends used to tell of being at dinner parties with Merv, where he'd stop the conversation whenever he heard a particular clich? or bon mot - another hidden phrase...
...heads, the way they feel at the moment), we can suspend judgment. This thing of losing one's head may be an old Sunni gallows trick. As when Saddam - just by being so him - provoked his executioners into treating him with insufficient dignity. If you can't cheat the hangman, as the saying goes, you can at least make him look insensitive...