Word: scratch
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...ways; a book can hardly be "only itself, apart and complete" and at the same time offer "a way of thinking" about historical figures and events. When DeLillo opens his novel with the young Oswald riding a subway, it is not as though he were creating a character from scratch; he obviously assumes that readers already have some idea who Oswald was and what he would become...
Like the other players, Grodin gives a nicely calibrated performance as the itch his captor cannot afford to scratch too vigorously. But it is De Niro's work that redeems an inherently improbable plot. He handles guns, quips and tight spots with the requisite elan. He brings something else to the part too: a deftly imagined sense of hard roads traveled before he hit this one, of a past lived, not just alluded to. When you root for him, you root for a man, not a killing machine...
Whenever the military moves to shutter a base, the member of Congress in whose district it is located rises in righteous indignation. Given the you- scratch-my-back-and-I'll-scratch-yours philosophy that reigns on Capitol Hill, even such an anachronism as Virginia's moat-encircled Fort Monroe -- built for the War of 1812 -- has been spared, although it costs $186 million a year and serves no useful military purpose...
Pathfinder did not start from scratch. NASA and the aerospace industry have long planned a variety of Mars missions that could lead to a manned flight. At NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., scientists are designing an unmanned rover with six wheels, each more than 3 ft. in diameter, to accommodate the rocky Martian terrain. In a still unapproved mission, the rover, imbued with artificial intelligence and television eyes, would seek out appropriate rock samples and stow them in a craft designed to return them to earth for analysis. At NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville...
...face of American business. Like Farrar, millions of women are setting up their own businesses and pursuing the entrepreneurial pot of gold that used to be mostly a man's dream. While there have always been a few women with the initiative and opportunity to start a company from scratch, they were the exceptions. No longer. At least 3.7 million of the more than 13 million sole proprietorships in America are owned by women, nearly double the 1.9 million such businesses they owned ten years ago. The Small Business Administration expects that one-half of all self- employed people will...