Word: midwestern
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...their ice skates in the off-season. In 1987 Rollerblade decided to market the skates as a fitness product for exercise buffs. Rollerblades were slimmed down and painted a fashionable neon. The company also launched a secret marketing strategy. Realizing that trends start and spread quickly in California, the Midwestern company gave away hundreds of Rollerblades to skate-rental shops along the beach in Los Angeles. Says Sundet slyly: "So what if the Californians think they invented...
...though it were the result of some exacting distillation. But it is thin and complacent, tarted up with costly materials for the audience of consumers whose pretensions it affects to despise. Its bathos (LACK OF CHARISMA CAN BE FATAL) might have issued from the warm heart of some Midwestern creative- writing course. Her phrasing (IDEALS ARE REPLACED BY CONVENTIONAL GOALS AT A CERTAIN AGE) is like a Hallmark card rewritten in academe. Holzer may sometimes remind you of Seneca (EXPIRING FOR LOVE IS BEAUTIFUL BUT STUPID) and sometimes of Bakunin (PRIVATE PROPERTY CREATED CRIME). But down deep...
...lace-up lawyer shoes. (Occasionally some modest stripes on his white shirts will betray a whiff of bohemian raffishness.) His accent in no way distinguishes his speech from that heard in the hallways or elevators; he flattens his vowels and comes down hard on his rs, in the approved Midwestern manner, and tends to drop the final g from words like coming...
...Clara Stern, wife of the distinguished trial lawyer Alejandro Stern, back her Seville into the garage, close the door and start the engine? Who was supposed to cash the $850,000 check she left with her banker before she took her life? How did this reticent Midwestern matron contract genital herpes? And what is the connection between her death and the Government's investigation of Maison Dixon, a commodity-futures firm owned by her brother-in-law Dixon Hartnell...
Like Prospero, Stern is a magician who confronts unruly influences in a brave new world. The Midwestern Caliban is played by Hartnell, husband of Stern's sister and his most troublesome client -- a "small-town boy made good, gone bad." To see him on the floor of the commodity exchange is to observe a force of nature: "He stepped into the tiered levels of the pits, shaking hands and tossing greetings like Frank Sinatra onstage, commanding the same reverence, or, in some quarters, subverted loathing." When he admits, "I've always wanted to do what other people wouldn't," Stern...