Word: harmlessness
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...saying that he had been a fine good-will ambassador. After an embarrassingly vague White House statement claiming that "the President does not now recall" whether he had shown the cables to Billy, Press Secretary Jody Powell jubilantly passed around copies of the papers, which turned out to be harmless. In fact, they had been given to Columnist Jack Anderson 14 months ago in response to a suit brought under the Freedom of Information Act. Though the cables were far from secret, the episode did raise a question about the President's judgment: instead of telling Billy to have...
Most home handymen used to be harmless basement tinkerers who whiled away their leisure hours building knotty-pine bookshelves. No longer. With a vigor born of economic necessity, more and more Americans are pushing themselves away from the TV set and doing their own home improvements. Risking blackened thumbnails and sawdust-filled eyes, they are installing bathrooms, insulating attics and renovating whole houses. Do-it-yourselfers this year are expected to spend nearly $28 billion, about three times as much as just seven years...
...fascination with itself. There is an almost instinctive urge on the Sunset Strip and in beautiful downtown Burbank to dredge up old films. Although Dino DeLaurentis reigns as the King Kong of this burgeoning market, almost everybody has tried his hand at it. The products range from ridiculous but harmless--Heaven Can Wait--to dramatic yet stupid--Invasion of the Body Snatchers--to just plain banal--The Blue Lagoon...
Last year, in America Revised, a study of American history school textbooks since 1833, Frances FitzGerald found that textbook publishers, eye on the profits, have learned to package a bland and pietistically harmless kind of book that dutifully records the point of view of every minority that raises its hand, or voice, but gives no coherent idea of American theme or direction. Says Pittsburgh's Hays: "We haven't had a new synthesis of American history since Charles and Mary Beard. Instead, we have had people going off in all these little directions and knowing more and more...
...Stop the Music aspires to nothing more radical than providing a raucous good time, and not so coincidentally promoting the Village People's new album. (The title song consumes the final eleven minutes of screen time.) It is hard to get angry about this harmless, weightless enterprise, an attempt to blend the spirit of the opulent old MGM musicals with the jackhammer sound of disco. The movie brings a certain chaotic zest to the group's Y.M.C.A., transforming it into a lavender update of a Busby Berkeley danceathon; and Paul Sand performs comic wonders with the role...