Word: panic
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Children play games of musical chairs. Teenagers play games of chicken. And adults make jury-rigged deals to launch expensive, redundant cable-TV channels. What else is one to make of the panic and quien-es-mas-macho giddiness variously gripping all of television's big boys right now? It's just the latest chapter in the ongoing struggle between the broadcasters -- NBC, ABC, Fox, CBS, their hundreds of affiliate stations -- and the cable-TV operators, but this time the frenzy is particularly intense and farcical, the ironies especially rich, the broadcasters wussier and the cable industry more bullying than...
...panic. Just hang up, take a deep breath, and log on again. You're not going to Panama, after all, just to a machine somewhere in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. And what you are exploring is not an exotic ecosystem but a computer system called...
...whose new show -- he calls it Late Night with Question Mark -- is racing against the clock to invent itself. All right, sauntering against the clock. In Rockefeller Center, young creative types lounge about in pullovers and shorts. It might be downtime at the frat house; no one displays the panic expected of kids who must start, on Sept. 13, manufacturing five fresh hours of TV each week...
Buried in this vat of feel-good glop are two piquant themes. One is a child's need to believe that invisible friends are real. Early on, when the four ghosts desert child Thomas and tell him, "Just be with your mommy and daddy," you can read the panic in his eyes; he is as bereft as Baby Jessica. The other theme is an adult's need to believe that our final worldly departure might come only after we have made peace with others and, thus, ourselves. That's worth a tear. Even a critic will cry for what might...
...similar model two years ago. That is in part because one can order a computer in every way comparable to the PS/1 from a mail-order discounter like Gateway and pay up to $1,000 less than IBM is asking. Consumers love it; the industry is in full panic. "This is no longer a business for the faint of heart," says James Cannavino, head of IBM's personal-systems division, "and if you think things are tough now, there are no rest periods ahead...