Word: blanding
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...blocks glide under the Harbour Bridge to the container wharves, past tourists beaming over the gunwales of replica 18th century sailing vessels. The twin architectural highlights of Bridge and Opera House flank a modern CBD that seems to rebuild itself every few years, while an ocean of agreeable, if bland, suburbs unrolls along the highways that linked the rest of Australia to the nation's gateway port. All around, the beauty of the bush enfolds the city in its embrace...
What caused the loss of the Kursk remained unclear. Russian officials fell back on old Soviet habits of secrecy and confusion during the first days of the disaster. They made no announcement for two days, then issued a bland statement that there had been a "technical fault" and the boat was on the sea bottom. After the seriousness of the accident became clearer, Defense Minister Igor Sergeyev declared that there was "incontrovertible evidence" that the sub had collided with another vessel. In past years Soviet and U.S. vessels have had near collisions while spying on each other, but the Pentagon...
...Hearing of Guinness's unrelenting modesty and bland wit, one is tempted to look for the actor's true self in some of the Ealing Studios comedies, perhaps "The Lavender Hill Mob" and its wan-on-the-outside hero, or the fabric wizard and social innocent of "The Man in the White Suit." But thinking that's Guinness up there onscreen is a mistake. He once said, "I try to get inside a character and project him - one of my own private rules of thumb is that I have not got a character until I have mastered exactly...
...straitjacket of high-gloss R. and B. and its numbing cliches (the champagne, the cell phones, the velvet-rope nightlife) is a real world of captivating but not always pretty emotions. Kina spent the mid-'90s singing in the pop R.-and-B. group Brownstone. Here she discards that bland sound for a pungent mixture of rock and soul that gives her hard, clear voice a surprisingly potent charge. She builds her songs around spare assertions of womanly independence, slamming the people who stood in her way or the lover who doubted her. These are the kinds of musical declarations...
...interesting sidelights of the TV press tour is the nuanced, and often puzzling, tinkering with the names of new series. Every year, through some alchemy, network execs swap one misguided name for an equally misguided one or, more puzzlingly, one bland name for an equally bland, and in fact almost identical, one. Last year, one quickly canceled Fox cop show - "Ryan Caulfield," a.k.a. "The Badland," a.k.a. "Ryan Caulfield: Year One" - had almost as many names as it did airings. And already this year, a good half-dozen new network series have undergone title surgery...