Word: outlandish
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...assertions were not entirely outlandish. Raymond Mabus Jr., a wispy, cocksure state auditor, had spent four years in a zealous crusade against public corruption during his first term in public office. Then, in an iconoclastic campaign for Governor, he railed against the decadence of "old- time politics and the oldtime politicians." Last week, at 39, he was elected one of the nation's youngest Governors and the leader of an awakening movement to free Mississippi from its long-standing image of lethargy and backwardness...
Perhaps no performer in history has chronicled his life cycle so thoroughly, or so publicly, as Bill Cosby. Certainly no one has been so successful at it. Even Cosby, a man fond of outsize cigars and outlandish hyperbole, would have trouble overstating the scope of his popularity. As main attraction and chief architect of The Cosby Show, television's No. 1-rated program for three straight seasons, he dominates the medium as no star has since the days of Lucille Ball and Milton Berle. And he has parlayed his TV success into a multimedia empire that seems to grow like...
Across the nation, law-enforcement officials are considering all sorts of imaginative and even outlandish ideas as they struggle with an endemic problem: the exploding U.S. prison population. Between 1980 and 1986, the inmate total shot up 78%, to nearly 550,000. In a dramatic protest against the incarceration crisis, the sheriff of Pulaski County, Ark., last week chained 50 prisoners, including 13 women, to trees outside the state prison at Pine Bluff because authorities said there was no room inside. Embarrassed officials quickly found space in the 696-bed complex, which is now officially operating at full capacity...
Howard Fields, 39, is making an outlandish splash in business. Three years ago, the Sausalito, Calif., entrepreneur plunged into the world of exotic- swimming-pool and -pond design. Now he is a leading creator of aquatic fantasies, with about 200 projects to his credit. Among them: a $3 million pool masquerading as a river that flows for the equivalent of six city blocks at a Puerto Rican resort. At Washington's Grand Hyatt Hotel, Fields is working on a $1 million, 3,000-sq.-ft. lake that will feature hundreds of live koi fish, 100-ft. waterfalls and a piano...
Similarly, "Wrong In The Charts" uses low vocal distortion to offset some Beatle-esque harmonies, and "San Quentin, CA" muddles a country ballad with a batch of terrific grunge. The best tune here is "Loch Ness Monster," an outlandish love song directed at Scotland's most famous anachronistic ichthyosaurus, more commonly known as "Nessie...