Word: armchair
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Kingsley Amis' twelfth novel is set in the now (1976) but hardly the here. Amis has rejiggered the present according to a formula beloved by armchair historians and sore losers: What would have happened if? In the case of The Alteration, the "if is the Reformation: it did not happen. Instead, Martin Luther accepted a compromise with the Roman
...noises). They can also be used for squash and handball. In the ticktacktoe game, the set may sneer, flashing a sign-off YOU LOSE TURKEY. For those who want to be the neighborhood Bobby Hull, most of the sets programmed for tennis also provide a hockey game in which armchair dudes can try to blast a puck past an agile goalie. Soccer aficionados can pretend they are Pelé, since the same game simulates soccer. For would-be Andrettis, there is Indy 500 (list price: $130), which comes with a vrooming sound track that may make parents wish the children...
Always a shrewd, careful scenarist (Accident, The Go-Between), Harold Pinter pays particular attention to the functional unreality of moviemaking. In one scene-not from Fitzgerald-a film editor expires noiselessly during the running of a new film. He is slumped in the front-row leather armchair, head rolled to one side in what must have been a last act of deference to the assembled executives. No last words, not even a cry for help. "He probably didn't want to disturb the screening," muses one of the nabobs...
Pennypacker's abrupt rise in esteem--"from the pits to the Ritz," as one former resident characterized it--provides plenty of fodder for characterized it--provides plenty of fodder for armchair sociologists quick to find an incisive explanation for any new trend. While finding any people who say they are unhappy with life in Pennypacker may be surprisingly difficult, it's a cinch to find 20 people with 20 different theories about why the dorm has suddenly become such a "bed of roses." But the various theories explaining the dorm's new-found popularity all return to a single fact...
Green Curtain. Armchair psephologists might have expected more of the network anchors, who crammed for the event as if it were a bar exam. Walter Cronkite, who for four years had been squirreling away newspaper clippings and other relevant nuggets of information, went into semi-seclusion weeks ago. Every day he would pull a loden green curtain across the glass windows of his CBS Evening News office and retype his dog-eared files onto pages of a loose-leaf notebook. "I don't learn just by reading, so I rewrite everything and get it into my head," he reports...