Word: gridding
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...here: the bouncy opening (with all the characters grinning at one another in a Hollywood Squares-style grid), the featherbrained plots (Marcia tries to juggle two dates for the same night, then gets bopped on the nose by a football), the inane dialogue ("I think your problem isn't a swollen nose," says Dad to Marcia, "it's a bruised conscience"), the musical punctuation marks, even spurts of canned laughter. It is, depending on your point of view, either a tribute to a classic piece of TV kitsch or the End of Theater As We Know...
...place, it will be because, for all the white-on-white elegance, it is not pristine and hermetic, not another gorgeous monolith. The rugged terrain and Meier's good planning sense have dictated a dense urban messiness, with odd angles and almost ungainly juxtapositions, rather than some prissy classical grid over which buildings as jewels are dispersed just...
...plan was beaverish: to walk, sniff, conn and brood every one of the county's 12 central grids, 744 sq. mi. on the U.S. Geological Survey maps. With much satisfaction, he reports it was Thomas Jefferson who directed that all of the nation except the already mapped East be ruled into grids, never mind natural or political borders. "Chase County sleeps north-south or east- west," he digresses (if that is possible in a project that depends on serendipity), "the square rooms squared with the world, the decumbent folk like an accountant's figures neatly between ruled lines, their slumber...
...seemed to have had other plans in mind for the President once they restored him to power. Yeltsin has been thinking of a considerably weakened role for his former rival in a future bare-bones Union: Gorbachev glad-handing visiting heads of state, Gorbachev keeping the country's electric grid in working order or Gorbachev making certain the trains run on time. As one brazen Russian slogan put it, "Misha, don't forget under whose flag you were rescued...
...each of the corporate top dogs had to go through the same learning curve. Contrary to what most people think, Auletta notes, a network is neither a giant production studio nor a grid of stations but simply "an office building, where executives package programs they do not own and sell them to advertisers and local stations they do not control." Trying to deal with these stations, advertisers and program producers (not to mention the ever nosy press) startled, annoyed and ultimately chastened the corporate newcomers...