Word: odd
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...ground to prepare the way for construction of a new 28-story bank building in downtown Nashville two years ago, a sharp-eyed workman spotted something strange in the limestone debris-an ivory-colored, banana-shaped object that looked like a miniature elephant tusk. Bank officials, hearing of the odd discovery, quickly called in an amateur archaeologist, Robert Ferguson, who immediately recognized the find. It was a fossilized fang from a saber-toothed tiger, an extinct, ferocious-looking creature that once stalked wide areas of the Americas...
...settings, fashioned by Douglas Schmidt, and skilfully lit by Marc Weiss, are decidedly modern or futuristic. And electronic incidental music and odd sound effects have been devised by Pril Smiley. One might surmise that the result would be a mishmash. But the idea of putting 11th-century people dressed in 17th-century garb in 20th-century environments is perfectly viable. One of the play's major themes is the wrenching of things out of their accustomed habitats, the appearance of people in "borrowed robes," the distortion of time. And the text is full of references to strange sounds ("every noise...
Cohen's messiah is as odd, as unexpected, as much of a stumbling block to credulity as most messiahs. His name is Simon Stern. He was born in 1899, the son of Polish immigrants to New York's Lower East Side. Simon's father works in a tailor shop. His mother tends a vegetable stall. Simon's life is devoted to a most worldly obsession-money...
...from Rome that Palladio got his most typical device: the temple-like portico in front of his buildings supporting a triangular pediment. He had seen it on temples like the Pantheon; in an odd but characteristic misapprehension, Palladio guessed that this stately entrance had come from the lost dwellings of antiquity. "I thought it most convenient," he explained, "to begin with the houses of private persons, as thinking it reasonable to believe that these in time gave rise to public edifices." So if the temple was a magnified house, a house could look like a temple. No solution could have...
...liaisons are ersatz. When the colleagues of one executive discovered that contrary to the sly suggestions he liked to make, he was really not sleeping with his pretty secretary, the poor chap felt obliged to fire her and take another job himself. Here, as elsewhere, Korda often chooses an odd example, then proceeds on the assumption that it is some kind of norm. In real life, secretaries are often victimized. But how many have been fired-as happens to another Korda victim-because the boss's wife saw them driving away from work in an aunt's Rolls...