Word: absurdity
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...childhood lemonade stand to violent leaders to environmentalism.The book is a deceptively easy read—you can fly right through it without catching half of Handey’s clever satirical insights. With its scattered structure of short pieces connected by repeated references to everyday characters with absurd imaginations, the book reads like a Kurt Vonnegut novel. Handey’s narrator appears to be a middle-aged man with a penchant for his own “funny cowboy dance.” But the individual sketches are very much units unto themselves, preventing the book from having...
...From a technical standpoint, flashy digital cameras and color iPods have set the bar so high for consumer gadgetry that spending, on average, 11 cents to send each text-only message seems absurd. The Short Message Service (SMS) protocol, a technology from the 1980s which still accounts for nearly all cell phone text messaging, has no formatting and a limit of 160 characters. Entering messages requires painstaking key pecking, and received messages can come out of order. Yet rather than dismiss it as backwards, most users see text messaging as a godsend and fail to appreciate it for the terrible...
...sounds like a fairy tale. Those who haven't seen this would never believe it. But it's not a legend; it's the truth. Or the time when they beat an old man until he became unconscious, because he didn't cross the street properly. This is already absurd; it's nothing, as long as there won't be Auschwitz ... and a green card ... The end ... When will it come...
...question is not as absurd as it may seem. Hosting the Olympics can boost the profits of host-city construction companies and tourism-related companies such as hoteliers. But is there a correlation between overall stock-market and economic performance and the Olympics? We decided to do a little historical research by examining stock-market indexes and GDP growth for the host nations for the past eight summer Olympics, excluding the stock market-less U.S.S.R. in 1980. What we discovered was interesting but inconclusive. On average, markets in host countries showed a 16.3% gain in their Olympics year...
...with a creature—best described as the bastard child of a yak and a mastodon—lapping from a stream. There is, in fact, a herd of these creatures, and Björk sits among them, camouflaged in vaguely Asian clothing replete with an absurd hat and an old backpack. As she warbles unintelligibly, Björk sits atop one of the beasts and takes off down the river. Now things get really weird. The yaks begin to flow into one another, like the water of the river, and Björk?...