Word: humdrum
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There's no surer sign of a fading soap opera than a lurid plot twist. Unlike their glossy American counterparts, British soaps traditionally aim for stolid social realism, depicting ordinary folk pursuing humdrum lives. Now dwindling audiences are spurring producers to unleash implausible killers and gothic disasters on their workaday protagonists. Take the hapless citizens of Walford, a fictional London borough that is the setting for EastEnders, one of Britain's top-rated soaps. Recent episodes have seen a troubled adolescent kidnap his estranged stepfather, chip-shop owner Ian Beale, to exact revenge for his psychopathic mother's death...
Rorty thus misses a fundamental point: novelists do not flee from the lofty abstractions of philosophers to the microcosm of the contingent because they are forsaking the universal, but rather because they believe the contingent is the only true portal into the universal. They believe that the one humdrum Dublin day in the life of a middle-aged, Jewish cuckold who defecates, masturbates, feeds animals, attends a funeral, remembers his dead son, and kisses the ass of his adulterous wife can speak not just to one perverse character’s experience but to the experience of humanity...
...campaign for Ukraine's parliamentary elections was fairly humdrum given the stakes at play after more than a year of governmental gridlock. But there was ample excitement the morning after Sunday's vote over the key question: who finished first...
...April, it wasn't terribly unusual that devotees began lining up at 2 a.m. or that all 20,000 coveted pieces were gone by 9 a.m. What was odd was that instead of queuing up in front of department stores or exclusive boutiques, fashion addicts were camped outside of humdrum supermarkets. And the bag in question was not one of Hindmarch's luxurious metallic clutches but a $15 canvas tote designed for ferrying groceries home and embroidered with the phrase I'M NOT A PLASTIC...
...drinking, the decision to imbibe is a personal choice, and therefore responsibility must fall primarily on the drinker. Instead of writing up any more shortsighted committee reports, the focus should be on developing better alcohol education, particularly for freshmen who enter Harvard without much experience with alcohol. Instead of humdrum handouts and dreary lectures, alcohol education should come in the form of interactive hands-on learning...