Word: mortality
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...magical forest for Godley’s estate—Arden— and the plot itself is soon complicated by the presence of the supernatural: Hermes, the Greek messenger of the gods, watches and narrates as the awfully-named Godleys eat, drink and live their mortal lives. Other gods also enjoy the human spectacle and occasionally intervene. As Adam lies immobile on his bed, Zeus seduces his daughter-in-law, Helena, disguised as her husband, also named Adam; the trickster god Pan meddles with the household as well...
...find in popular fiction, fusing the divine and the debased, the psychological and the theological, into a single rich, strange tableau that transmits a shock of truth. The institutions that we're used to thinking of as numinous and divine - churches, banks, governments, Tiger Woods - are showing disturbingly mortal tendencies. These days anyone can be dragged to earth, and when fools rush in, the angels are usually right behind them...
Bill has rightly pegged Alby as "a total sociopath." He tells this to Dale, who can't shake his love for Alby despite counseling from Mormon elders. Just say no to your gay impulses, they tell him, and Dale, shriveling in mortal misery, says, "That's what I've been hearing for 30 years." Every attempt at reprogramming his sexuality, from college days on, has only increased this very decent man's abysmal shame. Alby's wife Laura has discovered the affair, and informs Bill, who tells Dale he'll have to be taken off the UEB case...
...That mortal warning - Trust No One, possibly including yourself - is posted in nearly every movie made by Roman Polanski, 76. From his debut work at the Polish Film School, a one-minute shocker called Murder that showed a sleeping man being stabbed to death in his apartment by an intruder, to his new thriller The Ghost Writer, Polanski has plumbed the themes of isolation, persecution and claustrophobia. In 1963 Polanski gained international attention, and a TIME cover, with Knife in the Water, which trapped two men and a woman on a small boat to play out their sexual rivalries...
...After all, the idea of a cooking contest is downright bizarre. Why not have a kissing contest? Or a baby-naming battle? The notion of taking something so subjective, personal and essentially un-competitive as cooking and making a Mortal Kombat-style tournament seems, at least on its surface, patently insane. (The original Japanese Iron Chef took this as a given, and presented the contests as the whim of a wealthy madman.) If you've ever participated in a cook-off, you know how meaningless the scoring is, how opaque and arbitrary the judges' standards are, how random and unpredictable...