Word: specter
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...advertising color-TV sets in major newspapers. Price: $520 in hard-to-come-by hard currency, the equivalent of more than three months' wages for the average citizen. The event even moved the political weekly Polityka to a rare spoof on the Communist Manifesto. Cracked an editorial: "The specter of football is haunting Poland...
...veracity for himself." In an era of recycled journalism and package publishers who may be soon calling books "entertainment systems," everybody aboard The Train Robbers appears to have it both ways. Even the reader, who can spook himself with the thought that the SS rides again or ignore this specter and still get a doughty account of a daring exploit...
That night as she is in bed, making love rather absentmindedly to her live husband, an oaf who performs his marital duties like a man trying to park a bread van, the lecherous specter reappears to watch. The pharmacist can't see him, but Dona Flor can. Her consternation is splendid. As she rolls her eyes at him in anger and embarrassment, he sits cross-legged atop a large wardrobe chest beating time with his hands on his naked thighs and laughing like a demon...
Dominating the experts' discussions -as indeed it does all U.S. military planning-was the specter of the Soviet nuclear buildup. In 1965 the U.S. enjoyed about a 4-to-1 lead over the Soviets in strategic nuclear missiles; today the Soviets deploy 1,477 land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMS), compared with 1,054 for the U.S., and the Russian lead in submarine-launched nuclear weapons is 909. v. 656. The main American advantages remain in its bombers (417. v. 140). the accuracy of its missiles and the number of warheads (9,000, v. 4,000). But many...
...specter is haunting the tens of millions of Americans who are now sitting down to figure out their income taxes for 1977. Of the 88 million people who file income tax returns, more than 2 million will eventually receive a deceptively amiable form letter from the Internal Revenue Service that reads in part: "We are examining your federal income tax return for the above year(s) and find we need additional information." Translation: these taxpayers' returns for 1977-or perhaps as far back as 1975 -will be audited. Two out of three of those chosen will be assessed higher...