Word: backward
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
During week two I picked up the "swizzle." This is a forward vector in which the legs are repeatedly bowed in and out, apart and together, as if drawing a chain of DNA. This too I more or less mastered, while achieving some success at its inversion, the backward swizzle. I went home elated and then was tickled to find an ice-skating movie on cable called The Cutting Edge. In the movie, the Russian coach counsels his ice dancers, "Douglas, you are stem. Katia, you are petal. Together, you make flower." I was starting to feel a little floral...
After the instructor skated away at the end of the class, the other women in my group huddled together consoling one another with affirmations. Even though my learning curve was taking a nosedive, standing there complimenting and being complimented reminded me of something more worthwhile to remember than the backward swizzle: how kind people can be. At the risk of sounding a little too Oprah, the loveliest thing about the lessons wasn't the halfhearted compliments of the instructors. It was the shared glances of my bumbling fellow students--the solidarity of the incompetent. Don't knock it. I received...
With so many e-businesses crying "Backward, ho!" in a rush to reach solid commercial ground (and Web-related magazines like Business 2.0 and the Industry Standard seeing a slump in advertising), it's hard to figure out who's leading the charge. Are the print magazines supposed to lure customers to the websites, or are the websites portals to the magazines? Both, it turns out. And neither. Expedia Travels is not the official magazine of Expedia.com asserts Gary Walther, the magazine's editor in chief. The connection is purely commercial, a sort of code-sharing agreement for generating customers...
...very first punch line in "Peanuts." Charlie Brown and his friends could be, as the cartoonist Al Capp said, "mean little bastards, eager to hurt each other." In "Peanuts," there was always the chance that the rage of one character would suddenly bowl over another, literally spinning the victim backward and out of frame. Coming home to relax, Charlie Brown sits down to a radio broadcast whose suave announcer is saying, "And what, in all this world, is more delightful than the gay wonderful laughter of little children?" Charlie Brown stands, sets his jaw, and kicks the radio set clear...
...enthusiastic champions in the media, the most relentless and prolific of whom is undoubtedly New York Times columnist and author Thomas Friedman. Friedman's globalization is a fast-filling cup that will lift humanity out of the clutches of authoritarianism, tribalism and war, if only some of the more backward tribal warriors would simply fess up that what they really want is to be like Michael Jordan...