Word: freak
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...these standards, Harvard's men's swimming team has been a freak now for a couple of years. While most Crimson athletic teams have fallen from national prominence or have set their sights on local or regional competition, the Crimson has steadfastly striven to enlarge its scope, to burst from the provincial realms of ECAC action and embrace the national scene...
Glenn Gould was at once a passionate musical genius and a neurotic compulsive freak. As quickly as he polished off a Bach variation, he would also consume arrowroot cookies with ketchup, voraciously take tranquilizers by the dozen and spend hours on the telephone calling anyone at anytime just to talk. In his elliptically eccentric little film, director Francois Girard composes a series of thirty-two short compositions that capture the intense peculiarities of the pianist's insanely tortured and brilliant life. The director's minimalist documentary style, while ostensibly unassuming, is as intense as the Gouldian world it unfolds...
Nevertheless, the museum, while graceful, elegant and pedagogical, is a freak show -- a kind of Nightmare on Elm Street as scripted by Edgar Allan Poe. There is the Soap Lady, who, underground and buried, decomposed into a waxy gray substance called adipocere; she was purchased by the museum for $7.50 when Philadelphia's old cemetery was moved in 1875. Then there is the pair of twins who share a single skull; the Frenchwoman who grew horny protrusions all over her body, including her forehead (top left); a heart made translucent by chemicals; the constipation-racked colon of the Balloon...
...unseat Charles Robb as the state's junior U.S. Senator, the retired Marine colonel and damp-eyed star of the Iran-contra hearings has been doing a lot of ducking and counterattacking in a campaign that has turned Virginia's political season into a freak show. The race reached new levels of notoriety last week when Nancy Reagan, during a public appearance in New York City, blasted North's veracity. "Ollie North has a great deal of trouble separating fact from fantasy. He lied to my husband...
...first thing to note about I Don't Want to Talk About It, Maria Luisa Bemberg's Argentine film (which she and screenwriter Jorge Goldenberg based on a short story by Julio Llinas) is that this is no freak show. It is a poignant, often funny fable, unfolding like a cautionary bedtime tale. It skips delicately among the ruins of passion, obsession and propriety. As in the novel and movie Like Water for Chocolate, family matters are treated in a mode balanced between magic realism and tragic surrealism...