Word: offbeaters
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Venerable Lloyd's of London, the 297-year-old insurance exchange, has often accepted offbeat jobs. Its member underwriters have insured ships against sinking, actresses against breaking their legs, and at least one rock star (David Lee Roth of the Van Halen group) against paternity suits. The latest unusual client: the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries. OPEC has hired a Lloyd's subsidiary to help find out which countries in the 13-member cartel are exceeding their production quotas and thus depressing oil prices...
...their audiences as abruptly as attempts to innovate the classics. Stage professionals often think about a text for decades, absorb observations from a dozen or more productions, and feel so weighty a burden of tradition that they see no value in reviving the play unless they can do something offbeat with it. Audiences, on the other hand, often find older texts hard to follow. They prefer a straight, uncomplicated rendering that delivers faithfully what the author intended. But it is often impossible to be sure what the author intended. In the case of William Shakespeare, the most revered and toyed...
...reaction was predominantly blasé at Brown, a progressive liberal-arts bastion to which high schoolers seek admission more avidly than to virtually any other U.S. college (ten applications for each 1985 enrollment). Senior David Margulius called the situation "bizarre, but somehow not surprising. Brown students are always doing offbeat, experimental things. And they are pretty uninhibited in a lot of ways." Freshman Carol Putsel, 18, was even more matter-of-fact: "Just because it's a college campus doesn't mean that it's free of social problems...
...stand video games? Then you may be on your way to becoming a top game designer. That, at least, is the counterintuitive experience of Keita Takahashi, the Japanese creator of the offbeat international hit known as Katamari Damacy. The addictive game involves a cosmic prince rolling a sticky ball around a colorful landscape filled with things to pick up; it looks like manga meets Monty Python and sounds like Hello Kitty does hip-hop, and that has everything to do with the creator's inexperience. "I don't play games," he insists. "There are too many unoriginal ones...
...Bunny the Lifeguard’—bunny ears, a bikini top, and lifeguard thong,” he says of his days in Straus A. “I’d gotten the reputation of being that asshole.” Despite Nick’s offbeat choice of entryway attire, he received tacit encouragement from above. “As ashamed as my proctor [Zeev Ben-Schar] was of me,” he says, “I think he got a kick...