Word: ostrichism
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...notions of privacy are marked by sensory inconsistency. Out of sight, out of mind--is it so simple? Human beings, I would like to think, have progressed beyond the level of the ostrich in this respect. Yet sight, we feel, is much more embarrassing than sound. Why else would we insist on three-quarter stalls in public bathrooms? Why do walls keep our neighbors feeling private, even when aural clues leave little to our visual imagination...
...wasting his time, relying on a conceptual approach that was precisely backward. In contrast to just about all other physicists, Einstein was convinced that in the conflict between quantum mechanics and general relativity, it was the former that constituted the crux of the problem. "I must seem like an ostrich who forever buries its head in the relativistic sand in order not to face the evil quanta," Einstein reflected...
...think he has a desire to please everybody, and he is also an ostrich, in that he avoids confrontation at all costs. He will tell you what you want to hear to avoid confrontation. If he had just said to me [when I was at the Pentagon in 1996 and 1997], "I thought I could bring you back [to the White House], but I can't. I was wrong. Can we work out another way? I want to make you happy." Instead of stringing me along. It would have changed things...
...American decor may be nondescript, but Rebecca's food aims to please eclectic palates; the open kitchen whips up pheasant, ostrich, venison-and some kick-ass desserts. Wide windows looking out onto Beacon Hill's main street...
...finally, an entrepreneur unlike any other: Jim Moran, 89, who, until he retired in 1985, reigned as supreme master of that most singular marketing device--the stunt. Highlights: he sold an icebox to an Eskimo on behalf of the American Ice Manufacturers Association. He personally hatched an ostrich egg by sitting on it for 19 days, 4 hrs. and 32 min., on behalf of the 1947 movie The Egg and I. For producer David Merrick, whose Broadway show The Matchmaker needed a little extra coverage, he dressed an orangutan in a chauffeur's suit and set the creature...