Word: oddness
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...crop includes specimens of most of the genre's major varieties: big merchandise giveaways (Price Is Right), sophisticated parlor games spiced with celebrities ($100,000 Pyramid), R-rated competitions between couples coaxed into revealing embarrassing personal secrets (The New Newlywed Game). But most of the new hits are an odd throwback to an era of simple games and conventional contestants. Wheel of Fortune, in which players spin a giant wheel to reveal letters in a hidden phrase, is a variation on the old word game Hangman. At least three current imitators feature similar fill-in-the- blank word games...
...named Terry Winters. Done in a thick, ocherous impasto, which produced a paint surface that looked both lavish and summarily abbreviated, the image suggested (of all unlikely things) mushrooms: swollen glands like morels, crinkled and cellular, standing up in ranks like an array of mysterious brown balloons. It was odd to find any painting in such a show that addressed itself--however obliquely or eccentrically--to nature. But its relation to nature did not look simple. The painting was no botanical illustration. It was full of pictorial feeling and seemed only part factual, with the studied ineloquence, the refusal...
...directed to carry out a law that Congress enacts. The Comptroller General "cannot in any proper sense be characterized as an arm or eye of the Executive," even though he is appointed by the President; among other reasons, he can be fired by Congress. "It may seem odd" to base so momentous a decision on such a "relative technicality," the judges conceded, but the separation of Legislative and Executive powers "consists precisely of a series of technical provisions that are more . . . important to liberty than superficially appears...
...Harmon Killebrew Night on the David Letterman show. I got home about 15 minutes before it started, so I began racing through the 50-odd channels on my cable service. I caught the fourth quarter of the Celtics-Kings game in Sacramento and sat back on the sofa to watch the men in green go to work...
When Sports Illustrated runs a feature on a star athelete, they celebrate her for her athletic prowess. There is nothing wrong with celebrating beauty as well, but, for some odd reason, I did not notice any male beauties--oops I mean people who just happened to be modeling swimsuits--in the issue...