Word: bland
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...makes the audience feel like laughing, and that, as any comedian will tell you, is half the ballgame right there. Jack Benny could send his audience into hysterics with one squeaky note on his violin. Johnny Carson can turn a bad joke into a kneeslapper with a single bland stare, and Murray can send up lines so well by just standing there with that bemused, half-dopey smile on his face, that by the time he utters a word, the audience is ready to laugh at whatever he says...
...timing of Butler's comments delighted Wildmon. "I think it was a very good statement from a socially responsible organization," he said. Bland and self-effacing, Wildmon, 43, took up his crusade when he could not find what he thought were good programs for his own family. "Everything on the air has a message," he explains. "TV represents behavior modification, or monkey-see, monkey-do. A child sees it and it leaves an impression. But consideration, decency, honesty, fidelity, hard work-those values aren't there. If I disagree with the values that are there...
...past 20 months, Rosen has been living at Kalmar Lasarett, a community hospital; Sweden's socialized health-care system picks up the tab for treatment and meals. But fed up with bland food, she has been taking short trips outside: "I leave after lunch and manage to hit three or four restaurants before I feel satisfied. Then I come back to a new hospital tray for dinner." She would like to leave the hospital and cook for herself, but the big problem is money. Rosen lives on a pension of $7,680 a year, and government regulations allow only...
...visitors immediately retreated to the Central Committee's marble headquarters in central Warsaw for a six-hour meeting with the entire Polish Politburo. The bland Soviet official statement that followed significantly omitted any reference to the customary "identity of views" and contained no expression of confidence in the Polish leadership...
Wodehouse's childhood was a model of bland British neglect- parents absent ed in Hong Kong where father served as a magistrate while young Pelham was stashed in schools back in England. When it came time for Oxford, there was no money. The aspiring author had to clerk in a bank. When he was quarantined with mumps, the stay-at-home knocked out 19 stories in three weeks: he had taken refuge in comic art. It was to be his true home from then...