Word: numbingly
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...shade of young Emily Webb returns from cemetery hill to re-experience her twelfth birthday, Wilder convincingly argues that what makes all life look enticing is the distance granted by memory or imagination. As lived moment to moment, he contends, human existence is mostly ritual, habit and numb unawareness. Rather than be wistful for the life that is no longer, or never was, we should be open and venturesome in the time we have. The message is simplicity itself, yet its wisdom is so powerful that it has been echoed -- if never improved upon -- in countless sermons and self-help...
BIGGEST BOMB. Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton will be remembered for The Speech That Would Not End, turning the Omni into the hall of the numb and the restless. Clinton stuck with a 19-page snoozer of a nominating speech through signals from the chairman to stop, through a flashing red light and through index fingers drawn across the throat, the broadcast symbol for "Cut it short." His humor returned the next day: "It wasn't my finest hour. It wasn't even my finest hour and a half...
Take a look at your fellow prisoners next time you are stranded at O'Hare International Airport, waiting in numb misery for Groundloop Airlines to postpone your red-eye to Washington National. At least half the frequent sufferers -- blue-suited business plodders of both sexes -- will carry a megatech spy paperback. Not a detective story or a gothic bodice ripper but a 500-page thunderation about missile subs, perhaps, or rocket attacks on space stations...
...blueprint of a fable. Lots of things are a little too. The actors hold their attitudes a little too long. The resort's temptation for the villagers -- the prosperity it may bring to a distressed region -- is a little too easily shrugged off. After a while even those sunsets numb the unenthralled viewer; he wants to head for Vegas. Milagro is kind to its characters; it works as hard to discover subtleties in their stereotypes as it does to unearth gorgeous new colors in the Southwest palette. But the film remains genially above them, like an Olympian social worker. This...
...tumbling at Munich, Mary Decker's astonished spill in Los Angeles. Jansen's mother Gerry, who had seen the race on TV, spoke for the millions who watched at home and in Calgary, where a cheering crowd fell into shocked silence: "I think we were all just kind of numb." Jansen's spills brought down much of the U.S. hope for a men's speed-skating medal. The team had gone to Calgary seeing a chance to replay some of 1980, when Eric Heiden took all five skating golds. But the team arrived feuding bitterly and publicly over starting lineups...