Word: oddness
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...line of thought goes back to English economist John Maynard Keynes - the source of seemingly every important economic idea of this crisis-racked time - who first proposed what he called "supernational bank money" in 1930. During the economic turmoil of his day, he kept refining the idea and proposing odd names for the currency - first "grammor" and then "bancor." (He rejected a colleague's suggestion...
There was some disgust and disappointment on display in Kirkland JCR when it became evident that Brangelina would be flaking on the 80-odd assembled Harvard undergrads (and a few more looking in the windows). Word on the street is Angelina’s doing some filming out on Long Island, and couldn’t make it up for the event. So instead, the students patiently absorbed Haven’s words of worldly wisdom concerning positive action (yada yada), marveled at his erudite quotations from sources as varied as Mother Teresa and Frederick Douglass, and eagerly clung...
...Eisenberg, like Superbad's Michael Cera and their soul grandfather Woody Allen, possesses that ineffable something that makes it possible for him to be both a believable romantic lead and a bleater. He bleats his way through several unsuccessful job interviews. When he finally lands a job from the odd but endearing couple that runs Adventureland (Bill Hader and Kristen Wiig), he has the temerity to bleat about his assignment. He'd prefer Adventureland's slightly more glamorous Rides division, which he believes himself more suited for than Games. They shoot him down, with kindly conviction...
...Such descriptions abound in the novel in a flat, monotonous way, and the purely grotesque, after intense repetition, has neither comic nor dramatic value. Thus even those scenes which ought to be most powerful have little impact, as with the death of Senyor, a character of focus for some odd pages: “The blacksmith gave the word for the cement man to commence; they forced open Senyor’s mouth and began to fill it. Senyor’s eyes were bulging; his chest rose twice as he retched.” This would be gruesome enough...
Iqbal Hussein feels like a marked man. An itinerant laborer from rural Khulna district in Bangladesh, he now scraps for odd jobs in a market town 19 miles (30 km) south of Malaysia's capital, Kuala Lumpur. Last year, he agreed to pay a recruitment agency $2,400 to win a position on the production line of an auto parts manufacturer. But in the wake of the financial crisis, that job is gone, and Hussein, like hundreds of thousands of migrant workers around the world, is stranded far from home, saddled with debts that will take years to repay...