Word: dulling
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Frans Hals, born in Antwerp about 1584, was 20 years older than the great Rembrandt van Rijn whom he scarcely knew. He married twice, produced 14 children and a mass of canvases, but had on the whole, almost as dull an existence as the stolid, rich little city of Haarlem in which he spent most of his life. His talent was early recognized. He worked very hard, made a great deal of money, kept little of it. Because of his fondness for painting guzzling guitar players, beery burghers, laughing children, biographers have endeavored to make the domestic hard-working Frans...
Actors Laye and Novarro sing pleasant but unremarkable Sigmund Romberg-Oscar Hammerstein II songs, one of which begins: "There's a riot in Havana, a famine in Tibet, a quake in Yokohama. ..." The Night Is Young would probably be less dull if Edward Everett Horton and Charles Butterworth were given more elbowroom for their dependable buffooneries. Driving Miss Laye through the streets in a pouring rain, Butterworth sneezes, says, "Well, the suspense is over now-I know I'm catching cold...
...through the world as they came into it are a trifling minority. ... All testimony goes to show that the great majority of these latter-day Edenites take their antics in the altogether solemnly, if not sadly. ... All nonnudist reporters on the life at a nudist camp find it insufferably dull. They are diverted by nothing about it so much as the quiet but firm sway of the proprieties over groups that affect to live like nymphs and fauns. The truth of the matter seems to be that the average nudist is a puritan. . . . He notes with triumph that he experiences...
Because the Swiss for a long time have been professional neutrals, innkeepers, paid hosts to congresses of tourists, invalids and impotent statesmen, a literary tradition has sprung up that they are a race of small-minded, closefisted, petty burghers, slightly comic but mostly dull." In Via Mala Swiss Author John Knittel goes a long way toward exploding this commercialized tradition, shows that the Swiss, like other people, are human, passionate, beleaguered by all the human vices and virtues. A humane melodrama. Via Mala is written on the socially dangerous and apparently un-Swiss-like theme that...
...years the army has been keeping close track of suicides among its officers and enlisted men. During the long dull years of peace the suicide rate tends to climb higher & higher in the service until a war comes and soldiers stop killing themselves. Just before the Spanish-American War army suicides reached a record high, only to drop away to almost nothing during the fighting. The same trend was discernible before the World...