Word: oddness
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...skyjackings and hostage taking. Back then, the who and the why were known: leftists like the Red Brigades and the Baader-Meinhof gang, nationalists like the I.R.A., the P.L.O. and the Kurdish Workers' Party, and state sponsors like Syria and Iran, all with rational political objectives. In an odd way, the older forms of state-sponsored terror were easier to manage. They were tactical ploys with built-in limits to the damage that could be inflicted if the groups hoped to win hearts and minds to their causes--and the perpetrators left an address for retaliation...
What's scary is the unknown terrorist. Last week's case of Administration anxiety came largely from the sudden appearance of a 32-year-old Algerian named Ahmed Ressam. Trying to sneak into the U.S. from Canada, he was caught by luck as much as diligence. The 3,000-odd-mile northern border of the U.S. is as porous as Swiss cheese. Some checkpoints are screened only by video camera. The one at Port Angeles, Wash., where Ressam was arrested, might have seemed like a sleepy, lax place to cross into the U.S. But around...
...question, don't attempt to answer that conundrum. Both merely present Kaufman with a dispassionate, ultimately hypnotizing objectivity. It is very possibly the best work each man has done, and assuredly the best thing screenwriters Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski have done in a joint career devoted to odd fellows--Ed Wood, Larry Flynt--coolly observed...
Saints are hard to live with, and this one's personal habits were decidedly odd. Mondays were "days of silence," when he refused to speak. A devoted vegetarian, he indulged in faddish dietetic experiments that sometimes came near to killing him. He eschewed all spices as a discipline of the senses. He napped every day with a mud poultice on abdomen and brow. He was so insistent on absolute regularity in his daily regimen that he safety-pinned a watch to his homespun dhoti, synchronized with the clock at his ashram. He scheduled his bowel movements for 20 minutes morning...
...odd thing is the long delay in Velazquez's influence. He hardly touched the next generation of Iberian artists, and the first unquestionably great Spanish painter to fall under his spell was Goya, more than 100 years after Velazquez's death. The reason was social. Most of his work was done for the King and the court, and was thus invisible to young artists. And practically none of it went abroad. Not until the museum age, when what had been private became public, did Velazquez become the intellectual property of mediocrity and genius alike. Numerically, this is a little show...