Word: customizer
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...through doors held open by men who were always Japanese and usually twice their age. The girls cut through the Roppongi sidewalk with a disinterested air, telegraphing sexiness and unobtainability with each click of their high heels on the pavement. This curbside ritual was part of a hostess club custom called the dohan. The men dropping them off were loyal customers of hostess clubs who paid additional fees to take the hostess to dinner and then deliver her to work...
...custom in some parts of West Africa to plant a seed when a child is born. The seed is buried deep in the ground along with the umbilical cord. It takes root, slowly growing into the sturdiness of a coconut or a mango or a kola-nut tree. The tree is the certificate that proves this child existed in this village. It is stability in a region that has been rent by war for more than a decade. In its shade, no fighting, no hurt should come...
...today these are fledgling gizmos used by a handful of technophiles. But in the future, this technology may be standard in your cable box - and the software on it could be so sophisticatedly attuned to your tastes that you will watch not ABC but your smart box's own custom-made grouping of shows: say, the 32-Year-Old College-Educated Hispanic Mother of Two in a Northwestern Suburb Network...
...stay with richer relatives in the city and for newlyweds to hire a young village girl to cook and clean for them. But with "the fabric of the extended family breaking down, things have become distorted," says Lisa Kurbiel, a child-protection officer with UNICEF. What was a custom has become an organized trade, with children being taken as far away as South Africa and the Middle East. Closer to home, they end up in such places as the labor depot in central Abidjan, which offers young girls--most of them from villages in the north of the country...
...Spector's girl groups, a huge Beatles and Brit invasion fan, an intense radio listener who absorbed everything in the AM Top 40 between 1963 and 1969. Before the Ramones he was a glam-rocker, another New York Dolls fan. He would hitch rides on Queens Boulevard in a custom pink jumpsuit and thigh-high boots to play with a band called Sniper, finally getting his ass kicked one night like everyone who knew him was afraid would happen. Even after becoming a Ramone he always wore '60s-style elliptical specs, hiding what I always imagined to be pink mouse...