Word: randomization
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...when there seems to be nothing in particular on his mind. So with Bluebeard, whose hero is a wealthy, one-eyed old man named Rabo Karabekian, a magazine illustrator in his youth, then a soldier during World War II, then, briefly, an acclaimed abstract expressionist painter. There is a random quality to this history: Why one- eyed? Why a painter and not a cellist? Rabo's recollections are wistful and charming, but vaporous. The graceful pages are a gifted author's daydreams, but they never coalesce into a novel...
Miami Herald Police Reporter Edna Buchanan's graphic account of the McDuffie case and its aftermath is buried in The Corpse Had a Familiar Face: Covering Miami, America's Hottest Beat, to be published next month (Random House; 288 pages; $17.95). She reported the story and remains unconvinced by defense arguments that McDuffie died of crash injuries. The balance of the book is a recollecting of her 16-year career as Miami's murder maven. "I have reported more than 5,000 violent deaths," she boasts. "Many of the corpses have had familiar faces: cops and killers, politicians and prostitutes...
Almodovar is unrestrained even in terms of cinematic techniques. He shoots Pablo as he types from beneath the typewriter, for instance, so that we view him through the keys. In another silly scene, Pablo types to the music. There's no consistent aesthetic--just a series of random flourishes...
...industrial and educational groups to create new French words for every modern occasion. Thus, a Frenchman now listens to his baladeur, rather than a Walkman, and plans vacations according to his partage de temps, and not his time-share. While some of the expressions are felicitous -- the computer term random-access memory becomes simply memoire vive (live memory) -- some are decidedly clumsy. Computer hardware is vaguely called materiel, and the futures market has become le marche de contrats a terme (limited-term contract market). But, insists Mitterrand, "either our language is in the computer data base or it ceases...
...candlestick goof apparently occurred on a single sheet of 400 stamps. The orange glow of the candle flame was printed first through a photo-offset process. After a random quality-control inspection, the sheet was reversed so that the candlestick and the words surrounding it were printed upside down. Of 100 erroneous stamps sent to the McLean post office, five are believed to have been sold to the public before the CIA purchase. The whereabouts of those five stamps remains unknown...