Word: manic
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Doctors know that athletes who start taking steroids are subject to erratic mood swings. But a study of 156 steroid users found that 25% developed more severe psychiatric disorders, ranging from depression to manic episodes. Symptoms eventually disappeared after steroid use stopped...
Julian Chu is excellent as Alice's boss, Sy Benson. His manic ravings are hysterically funny, particularly when he and the rest of the writing team act out "The Musketeer Sketch" for King Kaiser, the star of Comedy Cavalcade. Equally admirable is Vanessa Livingston as Belle Steinberg Carroca, Benjy's mother. Decked out in terrifically tacky costumes, Livingston plays the perfect Brooklyn matron without relying on a heavy accent or overdone mannerisms. Angelina Zappia is also good as the pleasantly earnest Downing...
...growling. Most of Ionesco's works were funnier than Beckett's, more verbal, richer in farcical action and far less despairing. In Soprano, mock-philosophical discussion shaded into nonsense. The Lesson, a portrait of a megalomaniacal teacher, reflected dark satire of the powerful. Rhinoceros blended those themes with a manic physical portrait of a city where everyone turns into a rampaging beast. This eccentric mix of humor and horror, of prattle and inarticulate profundity, influenced writers from Tom Stoppard to Edward Albee. The plays are widely taught at colleges and high schools and probably helped shape the surrealist sensibility...
Students who strain to remember the statistics and quotes spilled our into bluebooks in a manic frenzy will come up with mere bits and pieces...
...deeds are neat, bloodless, imaginatively staged. In recent weeks we have seen a magician drown in a tank of water when his escape trick is sabotaged (Diagnosis Murder); a late-night TV host electrocuted by his microphone at a Friars-type roast (Burke's Law); and a manic-depressive book editor driven to near madness and pushed off a building roof to feign a suicide (Murder, She Wrote). Murders are never random or accidental or committed in the heat of passion; they are carefully planned by people with clear, easily understood motives...