Word: famed
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Creative recusal means that you refuse delivery on unwelcome items of knowledge. In a world of intrusive information, it is rewarding to turn off your hearing aid in the midst of a particularly cretinous and gaudy aria. In an epoch when fame is the coin of the globe, it is satisfying to slam a mental door on Trump...
...proposed by the mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot, who says that reality has shapes undreamed of by Euclid and surprises that ridicule the idea of order. The shape of a mountain is not a cone. Clouds, coastlines, tree branches, commodity prices, word frequencies, turbulence in fluids, stars in the sky, reputations, fame, the passage of history itself (think about the past ten months) -- all these are fractal shapes...
Live performances also provide the chance to make musical history. Singer Jose Feliciano ensured his place in the anthem hall of fame after his bluesy Latin interpretation at the 1968 World Series in Detroit, ending the song with "Oh, yeah." RCA Records pressed a single of it the next day. After that, performers strained to put their personal stamp on the anthem: Lou Rawls (languorous jazz), Aretha Franklin (Motown), Al Hirt (Dixieland) and Frank Sinatra (moody lounge lizard). The prize for the most ear-bending version goes to Jimi Hendrix's screeching finale at Woodstock...
This lack of self-awareness on Mencken's part is indicative of the ideology which spawned his fame. His was a public life, and a privileged one, and he conceived of his role in American society as that of the unassailable critic, as one who thought his message was as important as his means. An eternal fondness for dismissing sacred cows did not mean that Mencken as a man or as a writer even began to address...
...ever-changing world of frozen dairy desserts, fame is a transient thing. Every confection has a brief shot at glory, a moment in the sun, and then it melts away...