Word: humorlessness
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...contrast between the two leading candidates seems to offer the voters a clear choice: Livni, 50, is an elegant but often humorless lawyer who did a brief stint in Europe as a Mossad agent. She is committed to seeking peace with the Palestinians, based on a two-state solution, and she is admired by U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, among others, for her level-headedness and tenacity. A mother of three who lives in a modest Tel Aviv apartment, Livni's image as "Mrs. Clean" resonates with Israelis tired of the sleaze associated with Olmert, the target of long...
...Xiaodong was too lost in his delicate brushstrokes - too deep in the trash heap beneath an East Naples underpass - to notice his visitors: a pair of helmetless (and humorless) teenagers, who had quietly rolled in on a moped as the star Chinese painter added touches of color to his latest en plein air work of social neo-realism...
Commenters tend to respond with surprise--they're shocked, shocked!--when people call them on being not nice. In their social universe, this kind of rhetorical slap-fighting is just how you do business, and anybody who feels otherwise is thin-skinned and humorless. As lame and self-serving as this excuse is, we can learn something from taking it at face value. Maybe commenters are just on one side of a cultural disconnect between two incompatible ideas of what the social conventions of the Internet should be. One is based on the standards of real-world, off-line politeness...
...King Lear, tells the story of a top official leaving office -as former President Havel did in 2003. Some of its characters seem easily recognizable to those familiar with Czech politics. But Havel is not being disingenuous: The lead character, an aging politician named Vilem Rieger, is far too humorless to represent the former dissident who once scored Lou Reed an after-dinner gig at the White House. "I was interested in the more existential side of things," Havel told reporters in Prague this week. "I thought it was interesting how when someone loses power he can also lose...
...their loved ones. The movie itself is a deception, however; marriage, as any gender studies concentrator could tell you, is a contract that binds together people’s lives in more than one way. Sachs, an award-winning director, flattens the complexity of this ancient establishment into a humorless discussion on the possibility of true love...