Word: riff
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...before it ended, and the forward-thinking Miller came prepared for such fourth-quarter doldrums with the catch-phrase, "Start blow-drying Teddy Koppel's hair, because this one's done." His patter included a mention of the sword of Damocles poised above San Francisco's offensive line, a riff in which he imagined a player whose jersey number was pi, and the observation that Patriots head coach Bill Belichick "blinks about as frequently as Clint Eastwood in a Sergio Leone film." This isn't just wit. This seems to me to be the point of sportscasters. Football, like...
...That first paragraph was a lie, though it depends on what you mean by "lie." Rather, you could call it an ironic riff on the shocking predictability of political conventions and the importance of Gary Smith. At age 65, with 24 Emmy awards and four decades' experience with TV specials and variety shows, Smith has served as executive producer for Democratic conventions since 1988, when he began renting out his considerable showbiz expertise to a tradition that was, even then, wearing thin. That was the year he updated the look of the convention with an imposing wall of video screens...
...Rolling Stones' "Satisfaction," a perennial chart-topper in lists of this sort, placed second, a testament to the enduring appeal of a monster riff attached to a slurred lyric that manages to be youthful and world-weary at the same time - a three-minute "Catcher in the Rye" for its generation and all those that followed...
...locks in to the groove on bass (Chew is off working today, driving a truck for Williams-Sonoma), David Kimbrough Jr. adds a slinky guitar part, and Kenny Kimbrough wails on a conga. The instruments chase each other around the barn, hanging on a single chord and repeating a riff over and over with subtle variations and rising power while the folks outside dance in the dirt. This is trance music--the kind of sonic moonshine that has been served up for decades in the juke joints of north Mississippi--and it raises a question: How did these shaggy Dickinson...
...deft move, the foreign-policy lightweight who failed a pop quiz on global leaders last fall outflanked Gore from the right and the left. The plan plays a new riff on Ronald Reagan's beloved theme of substituting Star Wars for "mutually assured destruction," erecting magical defenses that would eliminate the need for so many dangerous warheads. Bush and his advisers mulled over that concept a year ago in Austin, Texas, then set it aside for the primaries. The topic popped up again during his Sunday phone conferences with Condoleezza Rice and other aides. On May 2, Bush summoned Rice...