Word: excessive
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...best it conveyed an idea about how the rottenness of big cities touches everyone, high and low, respectable and raffish. Director Curtis Hanson, working off James Ellroy's bitterly brewed novel about corrupt 1950s cops, gets that wonderfully right in a smart, complex film that exuberantly mixes comic excess, melodramatic pressure, romantic rue and an almost casual murderousness...
While autopsy results were withheld pending results of drug tests, it is clear that Farley's life was ravaged by his obsession with excess. His comic persona, honed to a sweaty, self-mocking perfection on NBC's Saturday Night Live from 1990 to 1995 and in such hit films as Beverly Hills Ninja, was of the ne'er-do-well party guy, the angst-ridden outsider, the addled but lovable omnivore. But that proved to be true life as well, reflecting a fierce appetite for beer, cocaine and heroin, food and women. He went through drug- and alcohol-rehab clinics...
...also wanted developing countries to make cuts of their own, and proposed a system of emissions trading that would let the market, not government, decide how to achieve cutbacks. A country that had overshot its goals, for example, could sell its excess percentage points to a nation that had fallen short. And a company that modernized a plant in another country would get to take credit itself for the resulting savings...
...when all of Rome poured into the streets for days of public revelry. Even Christianity couldn't take the urge for orgies out of Christmas. In Europe's Middle Ages, the holiday was celebrated by troops of costumed people going door to door, dancing in the streets, drinking to excess and indulging in a favorite old-time carnival activity: transvestism. Nor were these fun doings restricted to the Christmas season: up to a third of the year was given over to carnivals, each pegged to some ostensibly religious occasion...
...SMOKE IN YOUR EYES Several companies in Europe and the U.S. are marketing a new generation of micro-power plants small enough to fit in your basement. Not only do they generate electricity, but their excess heat warms the house. These new-age power plants are based on tiny engines and produce electricity less expensively than multibillion-dollar coal and nuclear plants...