Word: frisson
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...After all the game's only just begun, there's not too much point speculating at this stage," I say in Mandarin. At which point a suited business woman who had been concentrating on her PSP pauses her game and fixes me with an intense stare. I feel a frisson of excitement but look away first."Dog farts! This guy's shifty. He's spoken for three minutes without saying a thing. Keep an eye on him." I gulp, she has obviously mistaken my occasional blinking (caused, I protest, by tiredness) for a sign of guilt...
...composition because you have to get the message across with a minimum of effort," says Hamdan Omar, an art-school chum of Zakii's who worked alongside him in the Kuala Lumpur ad world. As a consequence, Zakii's polished paintings sometimes appear unattractive to collectors looking for more frisson - a characteristic of the Indonesian Masriadi's work, for instance. "Zakii's very good at composition," says Kuala Lumpur art-gallery owner Valentine Willie. "But that's perhaps his weakness because his paintings are sometimes too beautifully composed. They sometimes don't have an edge...
...back as the 1980s, the Internet has been an electronic masked ball, a place where people can play with new identities and get off on the frisson of being somebody else. MIT sociologist Sherry Turkle has argued that this kind of identity-play even has therapeutic value. You certainly can't ascribe a plausible financial motive to Mackey--rahodeb's postings weren't moving stock prices around. This was about just being naughty: picture Mackey chortling as he played the regular rube, like Marie Antoinette dressing up as a peasant and milking cows on the fake farm she built near...
...checkout with the determination of candidates converging on undecided voters. He stands between them and their escape to the weekend, hand outstretched. Eggs and curses: that's the welcome most such leaders could expect. But this feels different. There's a ripple of excitement by the dairy goods, a frisson by the freezers, as word spreads: Bertie is here. The people of Navan, northwest of Dublin, respond to their Taoiseach - the official title of Ireland's Prime Minister - not with fatigue or ill temper, but with an awe and affection usually reserved for rock stars. As Bertie Ahern kicks...
...want a sense of just how terrible Monday's crimes were, here's something to try: imagine yourself committing them. It's easy enough to contemplate what it would feel like to rob a bank or steal a car; you might even summon a hint of the outlaw frisson that could make such crimes seem appealing. But picture yourself as Cho Seung-Hui, the 23-year-old student responsible for the Virginia Tech bloodbath, walking the halls of the school, selecting lives to extinguish and then ... extinguishing them. It is perhaps a measure of our humanity that we could sooner...