At 61, Kimball appears fond of this in a hard-bitten kind of way, so when a fake blog post attributed to the famously belligerent chef Gordon Ramsay referred to Kimball as a "Poindexter," Kimball, thinking the post was real, tweeted to Ramsay his thanks.
This is a level for the hard-bitten aficionado, the kind of FPS player that understands true satisfaction only comes from mastering a genuine challenge – as much puzzle as battle royale, stuffed with secrets and built for replay.
Suddenly I was hard-bitten and recalcitrant, the kind of kid who took pleasure in sticking pins into cats; the kind who chased down smart kids to spray them with mace.
If you walk into the yard a second time and are bitten, you have bitten you.
Rather than emphasizing discipline, organization and uniformity of message, Mr. Alterman suggests, they favor self-criticism, diversity and fairness, which makes them weaker competitors, especially on the kind of sound-bitten yelling contests that increasingly characterize radio and television.
On a single set that is somehow part control tower, part head office, part flophouse hotel and part riotous restaurant-honky tonk, on a remote South American airstrip, it's a tale from the St-Exupéry-Charles Lindbergh glory days of pioneering aviators, exactly the kind of hard-bitten, soft-hearted macho men to whom Hawks – a friend of Hemingway – was always drawn.
Separating substance from noise requires a certain kind of hard-bitten detective.
"For a guy who is so hard-bitten and cynical, there is something kind of naïve and clueless that's charming about that," Andersen told me.
This is not an updated "Peyton Place," but rather the kind of self-enclosed, hard-bitten American place fashionable in American fiction of the 1970s and '80s and in American independent cinema ever since.
The theory could be fanciful, but I couldn't help thinking when I was in California of how Shakespeare's titanic dramas of kings and queens, heroes and villains, found some kind of resonance with hard-bitten frontier communities, accustomed to a life of extremes.
New York is not well known for snakes — at least not the reptilian kind — but people still manage to get bitten occasionally.
