Word: paleness
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...Pale and cadaverous, cowled and carrying a scythe? No, no, it's just so...medieval. You can't personify death that way anymore. Our age demands something hunkier, less menacing, sort of a surfer dude to help us catch the curl of our last wave gracefully...
Zzzzzzzarrrrrrrzzzzzzarrrrr! The soul-rock singer Seal is mixing himself a weird-looking drink. It's a pale-green health-food shake that's not entirely dissimilar in color and consistency to what one imagines might be found growing on the side of a transatlantic ocean liner. ZZZZZarrrrr! The sound of the electric blender mixing this concoction fills Seal's roomy Manhattan hotel suite, making conversation impossible. He adds a few vitamins to the sludge. ZZZZZZZarrrrr! Finally, the shake is done. It has the quality of primordial ooze; you half expect creatures part fish, part mammal to crawl...
...slip of pale magenta light shone out between red velvet curtains. It and the musical prelude could have gone on for three hours, and I would not have missed the opera. Three violins and a phat viola fiddled while Nero was ostensibly still in the dressing room. They made up the feisty, devilish flank of the Early Music Society Orchestra, balanced by a quietly attentive harp and two awfully long lutes (allegedly a "chitarrone" and a "theorbo") on the right, with two harpsichords rammed together in the middle like poorly parked flagships...
...forest: monkeys, army ants, poisonous frogs. Below, on a path, a woman and four girls, all in shirtwaist dresses. "Seen from above this way," writes novelist Barbara Kingsolver at the outset of The Poisonwood Bible (HarperCollins; 546 pages; $26), "they are pale, doomed blossoms, bound to appeal to your sympathies. Be careful. Later on you'll have to decide what sympathy they deserve." Fair warning, though what the reader must decide before finishing this turbulent, argumentative narrative goes beyond judging four white American daughters and their mother, set down deep in the Congo in the precarious year...
...quality--potential jokes are left unexploited while the existent ones lack the sharpness of revision. Like the movie Wag the Dog, the premise of Compleat Works is loaded with humorous potential that remains largely unmined. Lines like "a nose by any other name would still smell" are funny but pale when compared to the sardonic text-twisting of Tom Stoppard's comparable Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead...