Word: oddness
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...odd sort of victory for Bush: just a few weeks ago, beating Dole by fewer than 10 points in New Hampshire would have been considered quite limp. But in the supercharged age of nonstop tracking polls, expectations change almost as fast as the fickle fancies of undecided voters. By the weekend before the voting, polls showed Dole pulling ahead. Surveys taken before the final debate and before the last ads were aired reinforced the conventional wisdom that Bush was collapsing. His last-minute recovery and victory thus became a surprising triumph...
Those were the good old days. Tourists and all kinds of New Yorkers still come to the boulevards and side streets, and the Broadway theater still has its headquarters in the half-mile strip north of 42nd Street. With its theaters, odd shops and even odder people, Times Square remains a singularly exciting place. But the balance between high life and low life did tip for the worse during the 1960s and '70s. Pornography merchants proliferated, and street criminals grew more brazen. Funk and festivity were too often edged out by rattiness and fear...
There is already a center, though, and it is eponymous: Times Tower, originally the newspaper's headquarters, stands on its own triangular island where the three streets come together. Built at the turn of the century, Times Tower (now One Times Square) was the odd but lovable younger sister of the classic Flatiron Building a mile down Broadway -- until its terra-cotta exterior was ripped away in favor of a charmless white marble skin in the mid- 1960s. The dowager has been turned into a cheap mummy, yet the disposition of Times Tower remains an architectural cause celebre. Johnson...
Mutual deterrence. Against a sound track of feet crunching in the snow, the camera pans over a virgin white expanse to the shadow of a man. A somber voice-over intones, "After 20 years of walking in the footsteps of giants, isn't it odd that George Bush has left no footprints at all? It's almost like he was never there." This TV commercial had not been used, but Dole aides artfully leaked news of its existence last week. They called it their "tactical nuclear weapon," ready to air if Bush tried any negative ploy or increased his lead...
CALL it "My Conversation with Wally"--an odd look at the real person behind the carefully-scripted Wallace Shawn...