Word: dourness
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Youssou N'Dour, the great Senegalese singer and political activist, started off the evening with a set of remarkable songs, culminating in a lyrical ode to Africa. Jimmy Wales, inventor of Wikipedia, met with Richard Dawkins, the biologist and outspoken atheist, to explain why Dawkins' attempts to edit Wikipedia entries kept being rejected. Philip Rosedale, creator of the popular Second Life, a virtual world online, crisscrossed the cocktail floor in search of Suzanne Vega, the noted singer, whom he had met on Second Life but never in person. Each table was a microcosm of the TIME 100 issue, with leaders...
Youssou N'Dour--one of this year's 100--played a spellbinding set to start off the dinner...
...member after waxing her pubic hair. The private parts Verhoeven willingly parades around onscreen belong to Carice van Houten, who plays Rachel Steinn, alias Ellis de Vries, a dazzling on-the-lam Jew recruited to spy for the resistance. An able temptress and a contemplative soul, she adopts a dour disposition as willingly as she strips for her assigned Nazi boytoy Ludwig Müntze. Verhoeven, who co-wrote the screenplay with Gerard Soeteman, tries to make de Vries’ relationship a source of ethical tension, but the film overflows with so much sex that the audience almost forgets...
...rife with morally ambiguous behavior instead of universally populated by idealist-martyrs. And in action terms it moves like a runaway train - murders, gun fights, chases, torture sessions, follow one another in dizzying succession - in contrast to most such films, which tend to focus on people standing around looking dour and anxious while moodily plotting to blow up the munitions train. Most significantly, perhaps, it is directed by Paul Verhoeven, who achieved both controversial success (Basic Instinct) and near-universal condemnation (Showgirls) for his hard-driving, raunch-laden American exercises in big-budget sex and violence...
...most successful premiers ever - presiding over continuous economic growth, pushing through record spending on health and education, moving within sight of a peace deal in Northern Ireland" This Labour government has been an unmitigated disaster. Most of England cannot wait to see the back of Blair. The trouble is, dour Scotsman Gordon Brown will be no better. Rob Alp Arundel, England...