Word: outlandish
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...possible that Mark Karr is delusional or that he is - more incomprehensibly - simply lying. At least one former acquaintance of Karr's considers this a distinct possibility. Janice Myhan, a professor of education at the University of North Alabama, says Karr was prone to telling outlandish lies. Myhan taught and advised Karr when he attended UNA from 1998 to 2000, where he majored in early childhood education. Karr was diminutive and intense, Myhan recalls, and frequently peppered her with questions from the front row, stopping her in mid-sentence to get her to repeat her words, so he could copy...
...lack of specificity hasn't slowed down the string folks. Maybe, they've argued, there really are an infinite number of universes--an idea that's currently in vogue among some astronomers as well--and some version of the theory describes each of them. That means any prediction, however outlandish, has a chance of being valid for at least one universe, and no prediction, however sensible, might be valid for all of them...
Such bizarre logic quickly becomes received wisdom in a society in which even the highest officials in the land propagate outlandish conspiracy theories. The speaker of Iraq's parliament, Mahmud al-Mashhadani, a Sunni, announced at a press conference in Bahrain that "an entire Israeli brigade has entered Iraq ... trying to infiltrate various parties." That phantom force, he continued, is "camped at Babylon, whose destruction signifies the survival of the state of Israel in their holy books...
...sons of Allah have always excelled." Fallaci has said that Muslims "breed like rats," and she has complained that Muslims have left "yellow streaks of urine that profaned the millenary marbles of the Baptistery" in Florence. As it happens, it's illegal in much of Europe to say such outlandish things: Fallaci currently faces trial in Italy for defaming Islam. At least in the U.S., Coulter is not threatened with prosecution for being Coulter, but as I read Talbot's piece I wondered why the de rigueur intellectual response to Coulter in the U.S. is to dismiss her automatically...
...fiction novels such as “Dance for the Ivory Madonna,” writes in an e-mail that he is fond of the endless mornings sitting in Scott’s kitchen brainstorming ideas for science-fiction stories. “We would start with an outlandish idea—such as, what if there were an alien race whose life cycle literally followed Freudian psychology?—and beat it back and forth in a sort of verbal volleyball, going off on tangents, adding new ideas and different points of view, ranging over everything from...