Word: spur
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...leading producer of the high-powered computers that feed the Net, has long been looking for a way to spur demand in cyberspace for its network pro- gramming language, Java. In the Menlo Park, Calif.-based Diba, Sun found an affordable (estimated purchase price: $30 million to $50 million), scrappy partner with the know-how to direct the consumer push. Though Diba's enabling software for smart phones and televisions has received mixed reviews, it's building Internet-browsing TVs for Samsung in Korea. The Sun deal is "a way of playing catch-up," says Dataquest principal analyst Allen Weiner...
Mann channeled these earlier minor eruptions into great cleansing explosions. In The Naked Spur, Stewart is a bounty hunter who is shot, rolled down a rocky cliff, betrayed by partners, tortured by fever into screaming delirium. He uses the spur of the title to dig handholds up a sheer cliff, then embeds it in the face of his prisoner (Robert Ryan). Some fans of Stewart the gentle child-man do not like to see him become a snarling avenger. But that is what happens when the sense of one's own virtue is affronted. American innocence fairly begs...
Every son wants such a father, every father such a son. Dad in this case is tall, good-looking Clyde Latham, 87, who lives in the dried-up little West Texas town of Spur (pop. 1,300), where the tumbleweed can outnumber the pickup trucks and the restaurant of choice is the local Dairy Queen. The son is Aaron Latham, 53, a Manhattan-based novelist and screenwriter (Urban Cowboy) and, child of Texas that he is, a splendid raconteur...
...Clyde's invitation, an uncertain Gussie, now 84, visits Spur and shortly agrees to become his temporary "live-in." In Clyde's parlor the two sit in chock-a-block lounging chairs, holding hands, assuring each other without much conviction that they are too old to remarry. Clyde regales Gussie with Texas tall talk ("One day the wind stopped blowing, and all the chickens fell over") and old-timey family stories. He introduces Gussie to the folks at the Dairy Queen. They kiss, they hug. In New York, Aaron frets that his vulnerable father will wither when Gussie leaves...
What drove Tony was the prospect of creating journalism with all the life and immediacy of great fiction and the additional power of truth. He wanted to show America to itself so vividly as to spur the national conscience. It worked too. Every subject he wrote about remains lodged in the mind through the personification that he found for it, from Linda Fitzpatrick, the suburban girl who became fatally involved with the late-1960s counterculture, to Rachel Twymon, the Job-like Boston-ghetto mother in Common Ground. They may be gone now, but they're still alive in Tony...