Word: couched
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...neighborhood with shotgun pellets. He can't explain why he shot the dog. "What does it matter?" he asks with a shrug. Late one evening last March, he and a few friends crept up to a house and took several potshots. "I saw this dog sitting on a couch in this big window above the front porch, so I just shot him." Doug's expression is devoid of remorse or bravado as he drives by the brown, two-story house, recounting the incident one afternoon. A teenage girl with long brown hair sits on the porch reading. The outer walls...
...Home shopping, the ultimate in couch-potato marketing, seemed, at its cable- TV debut a decade ago, to be the natural successor to the shopping mall. But years of selling such schlock as silver bracelets and cubic-zirconia rings, plus a series of scandals, mired the medium at the low end of the retail business, even as it grew to gross about $2.2 billion a year. Recently, though, home shopping has spiffed up its image, thanks in part to media mogul Barry Diller. Since joining QVC as chairman six months ago, Diller has buffed the industry's reputation by luring...
Some studio bosses worry about missing the next big wave -- if the Kindly Kid genre is a wave and not a wash. Others may feel responsibility for young viewers, especially those in their own family; they don't want their five- year-olds on a couch two decades from now telling a psychiatrist, "It was those R-rated thrillers my daddy green-lighted that warped my life." It may be that a few moguls are hitting their midlife-crisis stride. They're tired of making vicious junk that passes for adventure. They'll feel better if they make innocuous junk...
...walked into the Oval Office last week, a 6-ft. 4-in. "loose cannon," as the Clinton crew viewed him. Moynihan coolly surveyed the office paintings, indicating his reservations, checked to be sure the elegant desk used by John Kennedy (a Moynihan idol) was still there, settled on a couch and told the President of the United States, 20 years his junior, that the BTU energy tax was dead, moribund, finished...
Which is, in the end, the only compelling case against the new gadgetry. When it was just a matter of spending too much time watching CNN and Who's the Boss? reruns, American couch-potato-ism was more amusing than depressing. But if the last remaining rich, secular public rituals -- shopping, moviegoing, browsing in the company of human strangers -- become reduced to solitary, freeze-dried experiences, we will have impoverished ourselves. The future, as it happens, will feel futuristic after all. But at least the Jetsons occasionally went out and mingled...