Word: alienate
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...dispute: the conflict between the Clintonites' desire for something known as "closure" (a New Age buzz word drawn from the vocabulary of family therapy) and the cry from other quarters for what used to be called justice (a term one associates more with the Old Testament). Indeed, if an alien were to view the tapes of Clinton's recent TV defenders, he, she or it might be inclined to think that "closure" was a kind of magic spell whose mere invocation could bring redemption and peace...
...that I like to belittle my hometown as narrow-minded, but, increasingly, the "you're an alien, stop complaining" attitudes are difficult to ignore. Topeka and Kansas as a whole often seem to fall some steps behind the pace of the rest of the nation...
...Kermit doesn't know what hard is: it is much, much more difficult to be a Teletubby. This is a fact that you are not likely to hear from the mouth of a Tubby; in fact, the actors--yes, those are real actors inside those bright, baby-shaped alien outfits--are contractually forbidden to talk to their adoring public. "My favorite color is green," says Dipsy, played by John Simmit, rolling his eyes. "That's all I'm allowed to say." And if the Teletubby creators had their way, we might not even know that much. Why the secrecy...
...truth still out there? The "X-Files" may have backed away from claiming that aliens patrol our night skies, but now a panel of distinguished academics is urging the scientific community to reexamine the evidence on extra-terrestrials. "Certainly there are objects that are unidentified, although whether they're alien space ships is another matter," says TIME correspondent Michael Lemonick. "The proposition that an unexplained phenomenon should be explained is imminently reasonable to scientists...
...mayor who squeezed the city's squeegee men is unlikely to give up his castle in the sky over a little ridicule. Perhaps he's just spooked by all the sci-fi movies depicting his glorious city being swamped by tidal waves, squashed by meteors and incinerated by alien space ships...