Word: circa
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Something strange is happening in television: the rise of VTV, voyeur television. Despite Survivor's gross-outs, its dark premise and its wall-to-wall cheesiness--the faux-Lion King sound track, the "tribal councils" held in what looks like a Holiday Inn Polynesian lounge circa 1963, the somber narration of Jeff Probst, former host of VH1's Rock 'n' Roll Jeopardy! and challenger to Regis for luckiest-man-in-America status--despite all this, viewers have embraced the desert-island soap with fascination and bemused contempt. Does Dirk have a crush on Kelly? Will Ramona throw up again...
...whose format signaled the presence of a Big Statement. The most ludicrous of these is by the Belgian artist Leon Frederic, whom the spirit moved to paint, in the 1890s, an enormous three-parter called The Stream, an allegory of the Life-Force (Henri Bergson was a hot philosopher circa 1900) in the form of thousands, thousands, of pink, roly-poly babies cascading down Alpine waterfalls and through a forest glade. This condommaker's nightmare took 10 years to paint (no wonder, with all that dimpled piglet flesh) and was regarded not only as Frederic's masterpiece but also...
Well, there's music in the air, but it ain't campfire songs. It's the sound of white rapper Eminem and his gay-taunting, mom-bashing, wordplay-loving new album The Marshall Mathers LP (Aftermath/Interscope). The old take on white rappers (circa the 15-min.-long Vanilla Ice era) was that they were, for the most part, whites who wanted to be black. But the new breed of white rappers--guys like Eminem, Kid Rock and the punkish Bloodhound Gang--is proudly white, and they tell you all about it on their songs (Kid Rock's new album...
They are your nightmare, these "white-collar robots." The complex products from German software giant SAP will do to your company's innards exactly what forklifts and robots and containerization did to the blue-collar world circa 1960. Installing these tools is not easy. The technical part is harrowing; the politics are horrendous. When the blue-collar robots arrived, the unions raised hell. This time it's management bureaucrats who are turning Luddite. Why? These tools threaten their cozy baronies, carefully crafted over several generations...
...what--exactly?--will she actually do? Circa 2010. She will be at home. Working--for the next several months--for Ford on a fiendishly difficult engineering problem. She won't be on Ford's payroll, though she will be drawing full benefits, even as a contractor. (During President Hillary Rodham's second term, health care, pensions and retraining will no longer be tied to a company but to the individual.) Her 79-member project team, only one of whom she's met face-to-face (she considers face-to-face a quaint idea that her mom suffered), comes from...