Word: oddness
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...time when playwrights like Stoppard, Hare and Michael Frayn are wrestling with weighty topical issues, Ayckbourn admits to having little interest in politics: "I've lived through enough times to know, as the French say, plus ça change - nothing changes, give or take the odd Iraqi war." One thing that musters his outrage, though, is the dwindling government funding for the arts, which has endangered local theaters like his Scarborough company - where, in all his years as artistic director, he has never taken a salary. "My salary is in the accounts," he says, "but it usually goes flying...
...going on four decades, they've been the odd couple of Method movie stars: implosive vs. explosive, compressed energy and showboating showmanship. Robert De Niro caught our eye and kept it by being watchful, a figure of static electricity, a hoarder of his characters' motives. He did more by seeming to do nothing. Al Pacino was the total opposite: he laid it all on the table. Then he sliced it up, gobbled it down and spat it out. Before leaving the room, he'd scream at the table, smash it to pieces and use one of the splinters to pick...
...accountable." When tweens see a picture of Cyrus with her back bare and her hair tousled, they don't see her as postcoital. That's an adult interpretation. Cyrus has made it abundantly clear that she hopes to remain a virgin until she's married. "It's this very odd attitude," says Durham, "where at once we want to eroticize [girls like Britney Spears and Cyrus], and then we turn around and condemn them immediately...
...Federal National Mortgage Association, a New Deal government agency, and was privatized in 1968 to get its debts off the government's books. Two years later, Congress created Freddie Mac, the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corp., in part to give Fannie some competition. The firms became odd hybrids--government-sponsored enterprises (GSES) accountable to private shareholders. And they got away with holding only tiny capital reserves to insure against losses in their giant portfolios--partly because of their quasi-governmental status and partly because mortgages were supposed to be safe...
...Grotesquerie" is an odd word to use here, because it's in conflict with much of the reportage that follows. Consider some of the places Theroux visits, and people he meets. In Bangalore, India, he comes across two guys, Vidiadhar and Vincent, who had managed one of the earliest call centers, among other things processing mortgages for an Australian finance company. Theroux sets up this section by noting that "in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Indian labour had been exploited for its cheapness. Coolie labour was the basis of the British Raj ... Again I recognized the paradox, that India...