Word: absurdness
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Exposure ripoff? Try "improvement." Instead of precious magic realism and urban condescension, it radiates a loving optimism and goodwill toward its Midwestern goofs. Surprisingly, this sweet comedy comes from the crusty David Letterman (through his company Worldwide Pants). Dave's involvement is limited, but Ed deftly captures the genial, absurd side--the sunny underbelly--of his humor, as when a friend bets Ed, apropos of nothing, that he can't meow loud enough to make an old man turn around...
...hate him (check out www.rockersucks.com if you don't believe me). And yet, as opposed to the WWF, where hating our enemies is a guiltless pleasure, Rockers villainy begs us pause. John Rocker may be a character, but he isn't playing one. He is a real--if often absurd--person, and yet we still guiltlessly revel in the cathartic pleasure of our very public scorn...
...Remember Saddam Hussein? With Russia and France back on their end-the-sanctions high horses, and with Iraq's U.N.-imposed 5 million b.p.d. oil-production limit looking more and more absurd the tighter the crude market gets, the Man from Baghdad is sitting in the catbird seat. With one twist of the spigot (or one move against Kuwait, for that matter) Hussein could instantly neutralize all the White House's work and humiliate the U.S. in the bargain. Think that's not tempting? Clinton, one presumes, is aware of this - and you can bet the oil traders...
...started with the lighting: Soft, buttery yellow, with that sort of Vaseline-smeared quality favored by Streisand, Walters and Sawyer. And while Diane makes it work, George and Al both looked absolutely absurd with those halogen halos circling their rock-hard coifs. Then the conversation started, and the anguish increased. There was Al, crinkling the corners of his eyes in his best "I feel your pain" imitation and managing only to look like he was in some sort of gastrointestinal distress. And here was George, leaning in so close to Oprah that he looked ready to fall right...
...debt bomb. The Marshall model didn't work in places like Mozambique and Peru. These countries were missing the vital social infrastructure, to say nothing of the legal and business background, that sped Europe's regeneration. By the late 1990s, the debt of these countries had reached absurd proportions. Today, for instance, every man, woman and child in Guinea-Bissau owes global lenders $964--a problem for a nation where per capita income is $160 a year. At last year's G-8 economic summit in Germany, the world's richest countries adopted a plan to help bail out these...