Word: oddness
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...really think I'm dour?" he began, referring to a description of him in a recent issue of TIME. It seemed an odd concern for a man at the center of the most serious State Department espionage scandal since the Alger Hiss affair. But perhaps Bloch's preoccupation with the media is understandable: he carried with him a color photo of a woman knocked to the ground in a supermarket by a burly TV cameraman who had been tracking Bloch's grocery cart. "That's the way it is nowadays," he said, sighing...
...odd coupling of CBS, once the "Tiffany of networks," and the mass- market K mart chain strikes some as tacky. Resorting to contest giveaways, moreover, smacks of desperation: watch our shows not because they are good but because you may win a prize. Some network executives are skeptical about the tactic's effectiveness. "Let's say 20% or 30% want to play the game," says Mark Zakarin, marketing vice president for ABC Entertainment. "The other 70% will be irritated by all the promos." Yet if the lure of loot ends up boosting the ratings, contest mania will undoubtedly spread. Anyone...
...have thought he had fathered a child by his "mistress," and when confronted in court with evidence of his partner's true gender, refused to accept it. "I knew right away that this was for me," Hwang said. Where others saw in Boursicot's story one of the odd corners of human life, Hwang perceived in it -- or reinvented it to be -- a reflection of decades of megatrends, from the French fiasco in Viet Nam and the waning of imperialism to '60s Maoism in both China and the West, from feminism to male chauvinist backlash. "What interested me most from...
...meanderings, the angry surge of molten rock from an Icelandic volcano, or the periodic slide of real estate in California's San Gabriel Mountains, where waterborne debris can roar down hillsides and turn million- dollar dream houses into nightmares for owners and insurance companies. McPhee's strength is the odd detail of natural disaster: "The house became buried to the eaves. Boulders sat on the roof. Thirteen automobiles were packed around the building, including five in the pool . . . The stuck horn of a buried car was blaring. The family in the darkness in their fixed tableau - watched one another...
...conscientiously worked-up factory scenes, and naturally so. He taught literature at the University of Birmingham from 1960 to 1987, and still holds an honorary chair there. But in either sphere his writing displays the wicked eye of a born satirist. Swallow's smile exposes teeth set at odd angles, "like tombstones in a neglected churchyard." A receptionist at Vic's factory strokes her platinum-blond hairdo "as if it were an ailing pet." This is a novel that lives up to its own billing: it's nice work...