Word: odd
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Blumenthal's well-documented rise from adversity is the kind of tale that businessmen like to tell their skeptical children to prove that opportunity still flourishes in America. A refugee from Hitler's Berlin, a street-smart survivor of wartime Shanghai, where his father worked at odd jobs and his mother supported the family by selling cloth to dressmakers, Blumenthal landed in California at the age of 21 in 1947 with $60 in his pocket. He worked up through two dozen menial jobs, among them serving as a gambling shill near Lake Tahoe and handling the lights...
Barely six hours earlier, the arena in Hartford, Conn., had echoed with the cheers of 5,000 fans watching an evening college basketball game. Now it lay in ruins. Said Restaurateur Frank Parseliti, owner of one of the 50-odd small businesses situated in the-$70 million civic center complex that was built only three years ago: "It looks like a big meteorite crashed in the middle of the coliseum." With a terrifying roar, the 2½-acre, 1,400-ton steel-latticed roof of the deserted arena had collapsed under the weight of 4.8 in. of wet snow...
...odd coupling. Only three years ago, Soares touted his own party as the "farthest left of any Socialist party in Europe." At the same time, leftists were castigating the C.D.S. as "reactionary and a refuge for capitalists and former fascists." Both parties have since moved closer to the center. C.D.S. Leader Diogo Freitas do Amaral pointed out last week that similar alliances have worked in other countries in periods of crisis. "We can get together for a limited time to solve concrete problems," he said. "Neither party has had to renounce anything...
...Goethe bore to theirs, Kafka is the first one would think of." Kafka has achieved a peculiar sort of extended immortality, alive not only in his books but also as an idea, an item of vocabulary employed by people who never read a phrase he wrote. It is an odd fate for the haunted functionary of the Workers' Accident Insurance Institute in Prague: his magnificent hallucinations have collapsed in the public mind to the scale of a worn-out adjective-one that turns the Beelzebub he implied (totalitarian bureaucracy, the Holocaust, the Gulag) into something only slightly more menacing...
...ancient Vietnamese proverb, quoted by Deputy Foreign Minister Vo Dong Giang last week during a visit to Bangkok, had an odd ring. Viet Nam was courting its former enemies and criticizing its former comrades...