Word: bland
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Moscow, for the first time since World War II, the usual parade was denuded of troops, tanks, rockets and jet fighter planes. As civilians marched with flowers and banners, and occasionally danced in the streets, Party Boss Brezhnev gave a bland, relaxed speech-and that was it. (Washington observers, though, wondered whether a military parade had been held in Khabarovsk, near the uneasy Chinese border.) In Prague, the parade itself was canceled and the populace was gently turned away from the statue of King Wenceslas in the main square, which has become a symbol of Czechoslovak resistance...
...three narrow stripes and followed by a wider one-much like the "V for Victory" opening of Beethoven's Fifth. However, Noland's sprightlier pastorale modulates into a green andante, followed by an adagio of cornsilk white, a reprise of mint, and a coda built around a bland band of airy, spring-sky blue...
Through an infinitely complicated mechanism, 135 million passengers were ticketed last year, encased in pressurized aluminum cabins, hurled aloft by 50,000 Ibs. of jet-engine thrust, comforted with rough California wine and bland Iowa steak. From the moment a plane takes off, it must be watched, first by radar at air-route traffic control centers, then by approach controllers, who assign the ship to a runway or stack it in a holding pattern. The trip costs the passenger about 5.60 per mile...
Petur Gudjonsson's Father seems insufficient and perhaps even bland at the opening of the play. But this is a character unaware of himself: he is created as the play progresses, as his own position and that of his sex becomes clear to him, and as his anguish overwhelms him. Caught in this process of torturous revelation, Gudjonsson is convincing and arousingly pathetic. What is most intriguing is that the father is never moved on the basis of fact, but, much like his wife, decides on the basis of inclination and reasons and rages in fantastic uncertainty. He must fail...
Nobody can beat the exhilaration of a pessimist who thinks the end-time has come. Writing slightly bad-tasting novels (Myra Breckinridge) and bland-tasting plays (Visit to a Small Planet) is just the start for Vidal. He keeps busy as an opinion maker, staging shoot-outs with William Buckley on TV and churning out some of the liveliest doomsday journalism ever, mostly in today's essay form, the book review...