Word: flatnesses
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...list-making to the depressing nature of adults socializing in a sandbox while their precious offspring play, is so acute. If she would just edit out the few soft touches designed to make us like Eliza - like her kind attentions to an elderly neighbor - Motherhood would play like a flat-out parody of the entitled, self-involved mother, fretting more than she copes and blogging more than she mothers. Isn't that a character ripe for mocking...
...counted in the ranks of the former. Its dirge-like feel and length are reminiscent of Pavement’s 1992 epic “Fillmore Jive,” but it has none of that song’s musical variety or piercing lyrical attack. Jokes that fall flat include “Stolen Pills” and, above all, the bonus track, which features an elderly British woman essentially doing a send-up of a Judi Dench accent while introducing the album. Yet these clunkers are more than compensated for by the album’s highlights...
...Soon enough Eliza has had a minor breakdown, a confusing interaction with a sexy younger delivery boy, and an enormous fight with her best friend. She has also saved her child’s life over the phone. The situational humor in all this tends to fall flat, and the bleak accumulation of incident after incident comes close to reducing this movie to cautionary tale—the cinematic equivalent of birth control...
...it’s meant to. Kemal preserves moments in his memory as meticulously as the objects in his museum, cataloguing them in careful and loving detail. Pamuk himself completed this novel over a period of six years, spending at least 10 hours each day alone writing in a flat overlooking old Istanbul, and the sense of that isolation drifts throughout his painstaking dissection of heartbreak. More than any other novelist today, Pamuk has laid claim to the dispassionate prose style and layered, self-reflective inheritance of Proust. At one point, he follows a numbered list of the ways...
...crisis of the 1970s, California revamped its electricity markets so that utilities could make more money by helping their customers use less power. It also began enacting groundbreaking efficiency standards for buildings, appliances, pool heaters and almost anything else that needs juice. It just proposed the first standards for flat-screen TVs. As a result, per capita energy use has remained stable in California while soaring 50% nationwide, saving Californians an estimated $56 billion and avoiding the need for 24 new gas-fired power plants. On the supply side, the state has required utilities to provide one-fifth of their...