Word: odd
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...contemporary Beijing, it peeks into the mind of Fenfang, a plucky dreamer who left her provincial sweet-potato-farming village in south China for the distant capital at the age of 17. Her youth, she tells us in the novel's first lines, began several years and odd jobs after that, when she finally succeeded in parting from her "peasant" mentality and realizing that some of the modern, shiny things in life "might possibly...
...story, with the rocknrollas as goodfellas, and their hangouts as low-London franchises of the Ba-Da-Bing. The dialogue has an East End accent, but it's basically Tarantinian chatter - the joking among ruthless men with roguish rhetoric and short fuses - leavened for variety with the odd upmarket observation. "Beauty is a cruel mistress," Uri says of his painting, with a mixture of connoisseurship and threat. Some of the lines could almost be put to music, like "The streets are alive with the sound of pain...
...slow descent into the Looking Glass land that hurricanes create begins just south of Houston along Interstate Highway 45, the road to Galveston Island. The first odd note is the number of blown out billboards and signs. The gold has gone from the Golden Arches, the toll-free phone number on the billboard for the class action law firm has been torn and tossed to the wind. Then the blue tarps begin to appear, stretched taut over the rooftops of strip malls and apartment buildings...
Francis fled the island and the home where she had lived for "40 odd years" with her husband, a sea captain for Texaco, taking only a few photographs and the bank books for the Galveston Grandmothers Club. It was the first time she had left during a storm. In 1983, Hurricane Alicia, a category three storm, had blown hard but with no surge. This time, Hollywood Heights, her West End island neighborhood just two blocks off the beach was quickly put under water by Ike. A moldy black water line high on the yellow siding shows where the water...
...Manning has no underlying value. "This is the ultimate 'beauty contest' market," says Raymond Sauer, a sports economist at Clemson University. "If there are no fundamentals backing it up, something like relative productivity among a pool of athletes, the market will ultimately collapse. It just seems like a very odd game to play, and to set up in the first place...