The basic story, of how a not conspicuously gifted but very determined barber's son from St. Paul, Minnesota, rose to become the richest cartoonist of all time, warms the heart in traditional American fashion.
For another, during his largely successful eight-plus-year run as the Mavericks' owner, he seems to have figured out how to be conspicuously fanatical, though not overly meddling or abusive, at least of his players.
Much of the power and interest of many a good metaphor derives from how massively and conspicuously different its two subject matters are, to the point where metaphor is sometimes defined by those with no pretensions to originality as "a comparison of two unlike things".
How could two such conspicuously different architects possibly see eye to eye on the shape of a bedpost, much less the look of the tallest earthly construction yet raised by humankind?
"His own tool of choice is what foreign policy types call 'soft power' — the less coercive means at America's disposal, from foreign aid and election monitoring to the sort of civil affairs know-how that was so conspicuously lacking when U.S. forces arrived in Baghdad.
In the end there is a 10th victim — but just who it is and how are questions Petri leaves conspicuously unanswered.
