Word: bland
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Exxon set off the latest oil brouhaha with a bland eight-page report on its business from July through September. This showed that the world's second largest firm (after General Motors) had more than doubled its profits to a walloping $1.1 billion-its first billion-dollar quarter in history. Soon after, other U.S. energy corporations reported spectacular quarterly earnings. Among the majors, Texaco walked away with the dubious first prize of a 211% increase, while Standard Oil of Ohio was second at 191% and Conoco third...
Ivory might have been helpful, but he is a careful and slightly anemic director, unable to dig out tensions lurking beneath his correct, bland surfaces. The result is a pleasant, pretty entertainment. One suspects that this film is outside its natural element on a theatrical screen, that its mod est virtues would shine to better advantage on PBS. If we had a properly functioning public broadcasting system in the country, American classics like The Europeans might be produced with funds and talent in profusion...
...other writers lapse into a bland, shopping list prose style which may be suitable for album liner notes but waxes tedious after 30 lines. Even Nat Hentoff, a normally fine writer, gets bogged down by his habit of quoting extensively from the artists themselves. A few anecdotes are enough to establish the parallel between Lester Young's personal eccentricities and the relaxed intensity of his playing--the rest add only bulk...
Still, if somehow you can overlook the cutesiness, Edelhart includes a number of useful recommendations, especially on student economics. Edelhart talks money without a trace of the bland B.S. that he dribbles in the later sections on social life. Some of his dorm decorating hints prove useful, too, (where to get free posters), for instance, though others are absurd, like decking your door with a "personal symbol...
Field took over with the understanding that a committtee would evaluate the center's performance and his own. The committee endorsed the concept of the center and Field's performance. But it did not endorse the status quo. In a bland memo to CFA members, Dean Rosovsky and David Challinor, assistant secretary for science at the Smithsonian, said they had accepted "in some form" a recommendation to form a new committee to oversee the center's work...