Word: oddness
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...spurned suitor, no matter how devoted, has his limits. For 76 days, through the mating season and beyond, a love-struck moose pursued his beloved Hereford cow, Jessica, around a Shrewsbury, Vt., pasture as thousands of delighted tourists gawked, clicked and bought souvenir T shirts. The decidedly odd couple never coupled, of course; he was affectionate, if not ardent, but she was shy. Last week Bullwinkle gave up and headed back into the woods. He had lost his antlers, as young moose do at this time of year, and with them his libido. Will he return next season? Not likely...
Some 30 pages into Philip Roth's new novel, a character named Henry Zuckerman comes up with a decidedly odd idea. The setting is Henry's dental office in northern New Jersey; the atmosphere shimmers with the sexual tension generated for weeks now by the presence of Wendy, Dr. Zuckerman's new employee. " 'Look,' he said, 'let's pretend. You're the assistant and I'm the dentist.' 'But I am the assistant,' Wendy said. 'I know,' he replied, 'and I'm the dentist -- but pretend anyway.' " This fiction seems indistinguishable from the facts of the matter. But once...
...life somewhere in New England. Roth and Bloom are hardly trapped; they now divide each year between Connecticut and her house in London. "We try not to be apart for more than a month at a time," says Roth. The author and the actress are, in some ways, an odd match; she needs people, other actors, crews, audiences for her work just as much as he requires isolation for his. So when Bloom is in rural Connecticut, her enforced idleness leads to a good deal of teasing banter. He: "There is no social life around here." She (to a visitor...
...artist, follows men whose aspects interest her. She tracks them down in the street and induces them to pose for portraits in her studio. She never chooses subjects with "capped-looking teeth," who display themselves as if their faces were "pictures already, finished, varnished, impermeable." Instead, she prefers odd-looking men, like a punk artist with an orange Mohawk, one of her most inspired characterizations. Yvonne suspects that he is a "spray-painter, the kind that goes around at night and writes things on brick walls, things like CRUNCHY GRANOLA SUCKS and SAVE SOVIET JEWS! WIN BIG PRIZES...
There was something distinctly odd about Chancellor Helmut Kohl's New Year's Eve speech on the publicly owned ARD television network. For a start, Kohl said he was looking forward to tax reforms, when in fact they had been in effect for a year. And why, at the end of his ten-minute address, did Kohl wish his countrymen a "peaceful and happy...