Word: owen
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...David Owen...
...city man who moves to the country lugs along a cargo of rustic dreams, all calamitous. As writer David Owen, an escaped New Yorker now living in the white clapboard town of Washington, Conn., says in the first sentence of this terrifying confessional memoir, "I love buying expensive power tools and using them to wreck various parts of my house...
Just so. Do-it-yourselfers, it is now recognized, are not morally stunted; we are merely ill. Our hands tremble as we pass a display of belt sanders in a hardware store. If this sounds exaggerated, consider Owen's passionate discussion of "The Joy of Joint Compound." He writes that "once, when I was resurfacing the ceiling of my daughter's bedroom, I stepped down from the stool on which I had been standing and into an open bucket of joint compound. The smooth white material felt cool and luxurious against my foot, which, as luck would have...
Kinky or not, Owen is clearheaded about house behavior. "When a new family moves into a house," he says truthfully, "water begins to drip from the chandelier." The new householder either pays local artisans or ruins things himself. Owen doesn't exactly tell you how, but he gives you enough information (in the "Fear of Lumber" chapter) so that the guys in bib overalls at the lumberyard won't sneer. He is especially good on roof slopes and pitches and household electricity. Owen strums his mandolin in praise of electric miter saws ("Yeah, if you can afford one," says...
...models in the world," she says, "but in no way do I make the same money as any of them." Asian models find it especially difficult to get work, according to Rosemarie Chalem at the Zoli agency in New York City. "In every country," says Chris Owen, director of the British agency ElitePremier, "blond hair and blue eyes sell...