Word: seem
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...must be the most intolerable person to know because I think about music all the time," says Lloyd Webber. His basic shyness and his air of indifference to most other subjects make him seem brusque and aloof. "Andrew is a very determined person, and he's very competitive," says his mother. "He has a one-track mind. He has a brisk manner and can be offhand. He has his difficult side -- he has a temper and terrific swings of mood...
Daffy was not real, of course -- just a sheaf of drawings flipped past the eye at 24 frames per second. But the comic artistry of such directors as Chuck Jones and Bob Clampett made Daffy and the other denizens of the Warner Bros. cartoon barnyard seem as vivid as Sly Stallone and twice as funny. They surely seemed so to Greg Ford, a scholar-evangelist who has mounted cartoon retrospectives at museums and revival houses. Last year Warners hired him and Animator Terry Lennon to write and direct the little black duck's comeback vehicle...
That was big news. Big news elsewhere, though, often doesn't seem quite so pressing in Ellsworth. The October stock-market crash got one sentence last fall; the blueberry industry, a mainstay of the region, got a five-part series. But nothing is read more closely than the court page, a list of everyone caught speeding or driving tipsy or lobstering without a license. "I want to see if any of my buddies are in there," says Carmen Griffin, a waitress at the Pineland Diner on Main Street. It may be a yawn in Portland, Me., but in Ellsworth...
...that offers a wine list and tenderloin with bearnaise sauce but holds mashed potatoes and meat loaf in contempt. American reporters discuss stories that straddle two worlds: a log-sawing contest in Brooklin, Me., and drug-awareness week at nearby Bucksport High. These days lawyers and real estate agents seem to outnumber clergymen and clam diggers. Even the lilting Down East accent, once spoken as if it were passing over a dip on a backwoods road, is losing its curls...
...other extreme, the relentless and ritualized normalcy of a society like Japan's -- there are only four psychiatrists in all of Tokyo -- can, to Western eyes, itself seem almost abnormal. Too few eccentrics can be as dangerous as too many weirdos. For in the end, eccentricity is a mark of confidence, accommodated best by a confident society, whereas weirdness inspires fear because it is a symptom of fear and uncertainty and rage. A society needs the eccentric as much as it needs a decorated frame for the portrait it fashions of itself; it needs the weirdo as much...