Word: hardness
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...bottom of the eighth, it looked as if the Crimson offense might finally get on the board when junior Sean O’Hara hit a hard line drive up the center with two outs and two men on base...
...really come as a shock to the industry; it's not like it happened overnight. There is no racial majority in the nation's 10 biggest cities, married couples account for less than half of households, and customers of every age and clime are increasingly unpredictable. This was a hard lesson for the restaurant business, which assumed customers would fit into certain broad categories: harried homemakers, say, or squeamish Midwesterners who would recoil at the sight of a whole fish. (To this day, the nation's hamburger chains believe that a trace of pink will terrify customers, a fact that...
...hard to recall now, in our video-saturated world, the dramatic impact of that first grainy videotape of real combat operations. U.S. Army General Norman Schwarzkopf wowed the world 19 years ago during the first Gulf War, when he swapped his maps and pointer for a large video screen. "I'm now going to show you a picture of the luckiest man in Iraq," the general said as the screen showed the fellow crossing a bridge moments before a U.S. bomb obliterated it. The effect was instantaneous, putting anyone with a TV inside the cockpit to witness death and destruction...
...These facts are so hard that the nation's grubmongers are being advised to give up on pleasing a broad swath of society and instead concentrate on small, specific segments of the market. It's narrowcasting for the stomach and makes perfect cultural sense, but it's still a great loss. I, for one, am sad to see the Average Diner go. I related to him; he took me out of myself; I measured my appetites against his. Sometimes I gloried in my conformity, as when writing hosannas to the universal white-bun hamburger of old. At other times...
Dining, to be fair, is getting the bad news late. The TV networks learned their lesson the hard way in the late '60s, when they found that once omnipotent stars like Lucille Ball, Dean Martin and Jackie Gleason no longer commanded the attention of a universal audience. They came up with all kinds of solutions - ensemble sitcoms with census-like casting, anthology shows that could shoehorn three stories on one Love Boat trip, spin-offs of spin-offs - but there were no more Lucy's or Dino's, that much was clear. (See the 100 best TV shows...