Word: humdrum
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Sticking out of AOL Time Warner's rather humdrum earnings report Wednesday was a very gaudy number: A one-time loss of $54 billion. It's the largest spill of red ink, dollar for dollar, in U.S. corporate history and nearly two-thirds of the company's current stock-market value. (It's also, as a lot of news outlets have noted, more than the annual GDP of Ecuador, but that's hardly relevant here.) All for something called "goodwill impairment...
What accounts for the revival of convertibles? Automakers seem to have rediscovered a couple of old maxims about the sexy beasts: they can be profit machines, and they drive showroom traffic, bathing an otherwise humdrum line of sedans with an aura of cool. Honda's S2000, for example, is a curvaceous hot rod that's a hit with critics and customers. Honda limits supply to maintain overheated demand, so you can forget about a rebate. But volume isn't the point. Says spokesman Andy Boyd: "We want people to think Honda is about cars that are sporty...
...magic paper would morph into all of these and more: the humdrum 5-7, the pain-in-my-rear, “I actually have to go into Widener?” research, and of course, for you seniors out there, THE BIG ONE. Whether the assignment called for footnotes or diagrams, annotated bibs or a boatload of primary sources, the magic morphing paper would be my first line of defense against end of term Scrooges...er...I mean...
Antz may have been an ironic and biting take on the modern workforce; Shrek may have been a refreshing anti-fairy tale that refused to follow the now-humdrum Disney movie formula. But for sheer imagination and consistent superb quality, nobody can touch Pixar’s phenomenal production company, which can charm laughs and approval even from a thing as deadly as a human child. If bedroom closet doors serve as portals between the monstrous and the mortal, Pixar movies serve as portals between reality and virtual reality. With the release date of Monsters, Inc. moved up from...
...reality shows' life-and-death metaphors for our everyday worries. Survivor made personal and business relationships into a wilderness struggle. But now that our everyday concerns are life and death, it's the metaphors that look trivial. You don't need Fear Factor to put an edge on your humdrum existence when you've seen 110 stories of steel permanence collapse, twice. Says a network programmer who asked not to be named: "When we look back, we'll be able to say that people [lost] interest in reality shows because [you can] never match the reality of what happened...