Word: bland
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...happened on a BBC panel show, aired well past prime time, where the question of sexual explicitness in the theater was under discussion. With bland insouciance, the moderator asked: "Would you go so far as to allow a play to be put on at the National Theater in which sexual intercourse took place on the stage?" Tynan took a deep breath, peered soberly into the camera, and said: "Certainly." Then, using the most familiar English four-letter colloquialism for the act of love, he allowed that there are "very few rational people in this world to whom the word...
Florenz Ziegfeld. He entertained like an emperor, and required guests and family alike to rise when he entered the room. He was a dropper of names and a picker of brains whom a friend once proposed for the egomania championship of the world. Somewhat muffled in this irritatingly bland and overextended biography by The New Yorker's E. J. Kahn Jr. (The Big Drink; A Reporter Here and There], the late Herbert Bayard Swope nevertheless emerges as a personality of extravagant proportions...
...result of all this," Cox continues, "is a new image of the ministry. Five years ago when you thought of a minister you thought of a bland, unexciting man somewhat removed from the stress of real life. Today's image is more robust; it is the image of a man who wants to lead people in the application of ideals in the secular world, not merely to preside over a religious establishment...
Stock Gag. Lindsay's major opponent, Democrat Abraham David Beame, 59, is a diminutive (5 ft. 2 in.), Jewish bookkeeper and longtime machine politician who became comptroller under Wagner. Bland and cliche-inclined, Beame droned on and on about "sound fiscal policy," no matter how glassy-eyed his audiences became. He had one indefatigable campaign gag: "I don't see eye to eye with Lindsay," he chuckles, "physically, philosophically or politically." Beame's candidate for city council president is Irish Catholic Frank O'Connor, 56, able district attorney in Queens, who is considered a hot possibility...
...knock the hero-the audience identifies with him. Failure to obey these laws is punishable by death-for the show, and sometimes for the career of the creator. The result, inevitably, is a season like the present one-limp scripts and look-alike actors, the halt leading the bland...