Word: dismalness
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Boston fans, the most loyal in baseball, depend on the Yankees to give meaning to their dismal history and relevance to their perennial irrelevance in the post-season. If only those damn Yankees had not stolen their great Bambino, according to Red Sox mythology, Boston would now be the envy of baseball. Were it not for those high-nosed moneybags in New York disrupting destiny, the Red Sox would drive the bandwagon that every young fan wants to ride...
...Zhou plans to combat the dismal esprit de corps in part by reminding officers that they serve a greater good?witness Shanghai's police slogan: "The People Are Our Mother and Father." Shanghai has become a model for "community policing," an attempt to introduce modern, people-friendly law-enforcement methods. City leaders divided the city into a grid?10,000 households per sector?and opened a tiny office with one officer in each sector. Neighborhood officers respond not just to emergencies but to people locked out of their apartments and senile residents who get lost?a way of breaking down...
...England on July 25, 1978, the test-tube-baby industry was born. Scientists had joined her parents' eggs and sperm in a Petri dish and then implanted the embryo in her mother's uterus. (Elizabeth Carr, above, was the U.S.'s first in vitro-fertilized baby.) Despite a dismal 15% success rate, the process remains the treatment of choice for infertile couples...
Politics in California has become a dismal proposition. The state is so large that most politicians have given up on the standard ceremonies of the stump. There is little human contact, few town meetings or door-to-door work; there are simply too many doors. The prevailing wisdom among consultants is that you run in California by raising a lot of money and putting it all on television. The public has reacted to these soulless exercises with disdainful apathy; Californians tend to be more interested when the state's nutty kernel of political extremists put some hot-button initiative--about...
Despite the dismal performance of April's Bulletproof Monk, Scott believes he's best suited to be an action hero (he does have really large biceps), though he realizes that he might forever be known as Stifler. And he has been known to Stifler it up sometimes. For the Bulletproof Monk promotion on MTV, he went out on a date with VJ La La and, he says, pretended to be drunk to make the experience feel more like spring break. He rarely goes out, he says, and rarely drinks--never when he's on a set. "I don't want...