Word: dourness
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...Yahoo!" whooped Robert Byrd, the Senate majority leader. Standing on the dais in a crowded Washington banquet room, the usually dour West Virginia Democrat tore off his dinner jacket, rolled up his sleeves, picked up a fiddle and began sawing away. Some 1,300 hand-clapping, foot-stomping guests at the Washington Press Club's annual salute to Congress followed him through rousing choruses of Rye Whiskey, Cumberland Gap and the new Administration's anthem, Amazing Grace. "My word," cried one amused Senator, South Carolina's Fritz Hollings, "they're going to have us all born...
...first glance, this week's contest for Senate majority leader looks like no contest at all: a dour conservative from West Virginia who is shadowed by past membership in the Ku Klux Klan, v. an exuberant former Vice President who is esteemed as an elder statesman of the Democratic Party. Yet the heavy betting favorite is shrewd Robert C. Byrd, 58, and not Minnesota's liberal crusader, 65-year-old Hubert Humphrey...
...President's style, though, contrasts sharply with that of his dour, ponderously rhetorical predecessor. Tall, barrel-chested and robustly athletic, López Portillo flashes ear-to-ear grins and laces his refreshingly brief speeches with humor. His inaugural address will probably be the longest oration of his life. He enjoys soccer or boxing as much as talk of public administration, economics or Mexican mythology. His writings include studies of both legal theory and Mexico's legendary god-king Quetzalcoatl...
...answer, one of the Premier's aides argues that "Peres wages psychological warfare." The personable, quick-witted Minister of Defense is a much finer speaker than Rabin, handles the press well and thus frequently outshines the dour Premier in public. Peres' supporters, moreover, have tried to malign Rabin by spreading rumors that he cracks under pressure, drinks too much, has crude manners and exercises little leadership. They have even whispered that Rabin waffled before authorizing the commando rescue at Uganda's Entebbe Airport. All this, of course, is proof to Rabin's backers that Peres...
...easy to imagine the eight major characters of Alain Tanner's Jonas Who Will Be Twenty-Five in the Year 2000 bundling into the back of the moving van owned by the protagonist of Wim Wenders' dour Kings of the Road. Wenders' people are preoccupied with their own rootlessness. In Tanner's mirthless Swiss political comedy everyone is one variety or another of Boho Marxist. In Kings of the Road, the hero, Bruno, and his sidekick, Robert, are only sporadically looking to connect. For the most part, they have engineered a working arrangement with hopelessness. They...