Word: riff
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...belt make their own statement. "Hey, man," he adds, "I saw the Arctic Monkeys." This is cool, Joel agrees. That itch scratched, Bell, whom the Chicago Sun-Times has called an heir to Billy Graham, heads off to give a sermon on parenting that starts with a soccer-dad riff and ends with a recording of Bruce Springsteen talking about the Virgin Mary...
...project, and offered to teach me to sing some Swedish folk songs.Now when someone makes you an offer like that, you just can’t turn it down. Before I knew it, I too was singing along with the group—a cheerfully sexist song with a riff similar to “Stand by Your Man.”By the end of breakfast, around 10 a.m., I went back to my seat for the remaining hour of the trip. I even remember feeling a bit sad when my train pulled into Chicago’s Union...
...Moore, Martin Sheen, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Jenna Elfman, Patricia Clarkson, Andre Benjamin, Ed Asner, David Schwimmer and the cast of Ugly Betty. Each of the 15-second to four-minute spots, which can be seen on deadlinehollywooddaily.com over the weekend and on speechlesswithoutwriters.com as of Nov. 26, is a riff on the theme "speechless." Hunter discovers her script has been outsourced to India; Linney tries to overcome her writer-less life with a 12-step meeting and a box of cards from the "Scene It?" trivia game; Penn mouths words the audience can't hear; Clarkson and Amy Ryan deliver...
...after delivering the best speech of his campaign before thousands of roaring supporters at the Jefferson-Jackson dinner, the Illinois Senator is easily distracted, interrupting himself to get a bottle of water for a man with a cough. A few minutes later, he stops in the middle of a riff to pick up an earring dropped by a woman in the front row. And Obama's energy level fluctuates. "He hits the wall in late afternoon before really firing back up," explains Iowa press secretary Tommy Vietor, making a sine curve with his hand. For long stretches, audience members...
...spectacle of Tom Stoppard hoofing it through the theater district on a bum foot would be disconcerting to people who think of the playwright as something of an litist. Ever since his sensational stage debut in 1967 with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead--his absurdist riff on a pair of minor characters in Hamlet--Stoppard has become almost a genre unto himself, taking intellectual, often abstruse subject matter and turning it into challenging yet playful drama. His game, frequently, is the oddball juxtaposition: moral philosophy and gymnastics (Jumpers); Fermat's last theorem and Byron's love poetry (Arcadia); James...