Word: dulling
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...wind of a late-spring chill bites through Philadelphia's Franklin Field, but it cannot dull the excitement of the moment. For the first time in the 84-year history of the Penn Relays, the world's largest and oldest meet of its kind, an afternoon of women's track and field competition is scheduled. The infield shimmers with color, a kaleidoscope of uniforms and warmup suits. One thousand college and high school athletes jog slowly back and forth, stretch and massage tight muscles, crouch in imaginary starting blocks, huddle with coaches for last-minute strategy sessions, or loll...
Though a New York Times review called it "stupefyingly dull" and its narrator "dim-witted," scientists have other than literary objections to In His Image (Lippincott; $8.95). In the book, published as nonfiction, Author David Rorvik holds that a baby boy cloned from an eccentric aging millionaire (and thus his genetic duplicate) is alive and well. In Washington last week, before the House Subcommittee on Health and the Environment, top cloning experimenters talked candidly about the book. That was more than Rorvik did. Invited twice to testify, he failed to show...
...journalist's job is to make the important interesting. But it isn't easy: just look at those dull graphics behind any network anchorman as he nightly tries to animate a subject like inflation. Boredom isn't something journalists like to acknowledge; it is merely endured. That ancient Chinese curse, "May you live in interesting times," wouldn't seem a curse to a journalist. Editors deal in novelty and discovery; the negative and less talked-about side of this is knowing when to spare the reader the overfamiliar. Newsweek editors were once oddly attached...
...easiest refuge in dull times is to hype a story-to make every major or minor shenanigan a Watergate (as in Koreagate, Lancegate and Hollywoodgate). Maybe you can excuse the Washington columnist or the fellow on the beat for tired coinages like that, but you shouldn't excuse the editor who prints them. An editor is always free to change a subject rather than try to inflate it. With Washington less exciting, the cover stories in the newsweeklies again range more widely, to science, medicine, entertainment and sports. Too many magazines and newspapers have also turned-to the displeasure...
Perhaps that is why the excerpts of Nixon's memoirs are so thoroughly and predictably disappointing. In a dull, clipped prose more reminiscent of Jerry Ford speaking off-the-cuff than his own roiling Pat Buchanan-William Safire speeches or football-fuck-em vernacular, nothing of the real Nixon emerges. The weird intensity, the paranoid desperation of the man who believed he always knew the right answer, and alone could act upon it, is gone. Instead, we are given a shallow, simplistic portrait of events, with the personality of the Great Vindictor sucked clean out of them. By contrast...