Word: lurid
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...cartoon elf or sprite or something pokes its head out from behind a window, then draws it back. No, I'm not a paranoid schizophrenic -- this is the much-hyped intelligent agent who comes with the box. I ignore it, make my escape from Gameland and blunder into a lurid district of the Metaverse where thousands of infomercials run day and night, each in its own window. I watch an ad for Chinese folk medicines made from rare-animal parts, genetically engineered and grown in vats. Grizzly-bear gallbladders are shown growing like bunches of grapes in an amber fluid...
...Baker, a quiet, bespectacled University of Michigan sophomore, has just learned that a little creative writing on the Internet can lead to jail -- at least, when it's a fantasy about raping, torturing and murdering a real person. Baker, 20, was arrested in Ann Arbor for having posted a lurid sex-murder fantasy on the Usenet newsgroup alt.sex.stories last November. "Torture is foreplay, rape is romance, snuff (killing) is climax," one of Baker's messages read. Ordinarily, the story might never drawn outside attention, but Baker got into trouble for giving his fictional victim the name of a real female...
More exactly, they may have been too caught up in the uniquely double- jointed exercise of 1) worrying about the deterioration of American morals, and 2) savoring every lurid manifestation of the decadence. Americans, in other words, found themselves torn between enjoying filthy pleasures guaranteed by the First Amendment and wistfully admiring the Singapore caning. By such almost unconscious dialectics, the people worked at sifting out the rules for a society paganized by sheer information and searching for a moral grid. Where are the morals to discipline the freedom that permits the sleaze in an inside-out culture of exposure...
...deceitful whispers and abuse of religious power, but also upon the sadistic sexual molestation of these small boys. Smith's film cloaks itself in the robes of fiction, but draws upon real cases of pederasty in the priesthood of Newfoundland and Canada during the 1970's. Without degenerating into lurid sensationalism, the twopart film details the reality of this painful nightmare, as well as the brutal psychological effects both on the innocent souls of the boys and the souls of the guilty priests...
...people who knew him. By the time he got to law school at Yale, they write, Thomas was already known "not only for the extreme crudity of his sexual banter, but also for avidly watching pornographic films and reading pornographic magazines, which he would describe to his friends in lurid detail." Acquaintances say when they heard testimony that Thomas had asked who put a pubic hair on his Coke can, they recognized his characteristic style. The proprietor of a Washington video store near EEOC headquarters tells the authors that Thomas was a regular in the X-rated section. A lawyer...