Word: absurdities
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...habit of conducting meetings while on the toilet. Goodwin tells how Johnson forced him to attend one of these bathroom meetings. "I remained standing, of course," Goodwin relates, "Johnson had the only seat in the room." Later Goodwin details Johnson's rantings about the Kennedys and "Harvards" and his absurd orders to fire one official or another for perceived acts of disloyalty. At one point, Johnson demanded that one of his top foreign policy advisers, McGeorge Bundy, resign because he appeared on television with a group of college professors...
CALL in the Catholic Church. Call in the National Guard. It's perhaps the most absurd statement by a college administrator in what is undoubtably the most absurd administrative scandal of the decade--Boston University's 11 o'clock parietal rules. When asked how students' sexual activity would be affected by the rules, B.U. Dean of Students Ron Carter said, "Students can have sex before 11:00 p.m. and after that they can play with themselves...
...images that are at first entrancing, then repetitive. Her affair with a photographer (Bryan Brown) is never a believable enticement toward a return to civilization. And since Gorillas in the Mist does not reveal whether Fossey's murder was the consequence of the life she chose or just an absurd mischance, the story ends inconclusively, in a moral and dramatic...
...norms on democratic values: they kept their monarchs and stripped them of power. That way the wish for some kind of symbolic family is satisfied, while the politicians run the democracy. In the U.S., on the other hand, monarchical and presidential roles have been fused. The result is the absurd institution of the First Family, an ersatz royal family decked out in republican garb and capital letters...
...November ballot. It would require that public-health officials be informed of all positive AIDS tests and that all sexual partners of those who test positive be traced and alerted. The measure's chief proponent, Republican Congressman William Dannemeyer, says he wants to correct the state's "absurd policy" of turning a "public-health issue into a civil rights issue." But Benjamin Schatz, a lawyer with National Gay Rights Advocates, calls the proposition an "AIDS hysteria law." The referendum measure, which has a good chance of passing, could affect the anti-discrimination movement nationwide. Few things are as influential...