Word: odd
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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LONDON—Enter any cheap café in Vietnam and you are likely to be welcomed by a steaming bowl of the national dish “pho bò,” or beef noodle soup. Look around the café and you might notice something odd: almost every patron is male and almost every server is female. Go outside and the story is similar. While men wile away the days idling over iced coffee, women toil in the paddies, planting rice, gathering it, and then manning stalls to sell it at market. Holding all top political...
...setting foreigners. By contrast, the far more conservative Damascus gives off an Arab-flavored Soviet vibe, from the paranoid residents and omnipresent secret police to the 30-year-old junkers rolling along the streets. The flow of refugees from Beirut to Damascus, therefore, has made for an odd tableau: the normally dreary city is suddenly teeming with sharply dressed Lebanese and foreigners figuring out their next move...
...because I was a pretentious one. My bedroom library was stocked with such scholarly tomes as The Natural History of Love, Eros in the Modern World, the Kinsey Report and Ginzburg's own survey, An Unhurried View of Erotica. Of these books I remember little except odd bits of effluvia. Kinsey informed me that one in seven farm lads had engaged in, shall we say, animal husbandry ("Until," as Tom Lehrer would add, "they caught him at it"). From Ginzburg I learned that Benjamin Franklin had written a mock-scientific essay on the technique of farting, in which he wryly...
...these critics, I haven’t much to offer—again, Carraba’s lyrics are often incomprehensible, the music that accompanies his shrieks isn’t ground-breaking, and the album art shows Dashboard members gazing in odd directions on a windswept beach...
...regularly. I like to hike, and I take one long backpacking trip a year. Flying is also a focusing activity. I come from a family of pilots, and it's always been part of my experience. It takes one's full attention, and that's restful in an odd kind of way. It takes your mind away from other concerns, not unlike meditation...