Word: oddness
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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...
...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...
...Unemployment Olympics are the hastily planned brainchild of Nick Goddard, a gangly, angular man in small glasses and a navy blazer who runs from one event to the other, herding the 30-some-odd contestants around like an inexperienced babysitter at a children's birthday party. The former computer programmer has been without a job for less than two months and says the idea for the four-event competition - Telephone toss, Payday piñata, Pin-the-Blame-on-the-Boss and the "You're Fired!" race - just popped into his head one night. "Normally you think of things like...
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...