Word: self
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Hinson's demeanor was familiar: he was his usual easygoing self. I expected the FAA staff and the Secretary's underlings not to like our findings, but I wasn't prepared for the real point of our meeting: they wanted me to bury the report. The Olympic Games were opening in Atlanta that month. The investigation might have miserable results, but "the threat is low," they kept repeating. What good would it do to upset the public and generate a lot of negative publicity right before the Olympics? I couldn't say an attack was imminent. Still, I knew that...
...that her nature? No. She had a bad breakdown when she found that she was stuck on the farm [in Rhodesia]. She turned into this self-pitying woman who started to live through her children. All my friends' mothers were appalling women. They had nothing in their lives - of course, husbands are just something you look after...
Commenters tend to respond with surprise--they're shocked, shocked!--when people call them on being not nice. In their social universe, this kind of rhetorical slap-fighting is just how you do business, and anybody who feels otherwise is thin-skinned and humorless. As lame and self-serving as this excuse is, we can learn something from taking it at face value. Maybe commenters are just on one side of a cultural disconnect between two incompatible ideas of what the social conventions of the Internet should be. One is based on the standards of real-world, off-line politeness...
John Mellencamp Life, Death, Love and Freedom; out July 15 Whereas once his indignation was trained on factory bosses, now it's Mellencamp's own broken-down self that's got him pissed. Producer T Bone Burnett creates delicate acoustics and puts the singer's disappointment ("Well I used to have some values") center stage. It will not brighten your day, but it's his best in a decade...
...play. He lovingly describes the new cricket stadium he has built in Antigua, complete with an American-style hall of fame. He revels in dropping the names of Caribbean cricket stars he now counts as his friends. But his spending on Twenty20 is not just a rich fan's self-indulgence: he says the sport is the perfect vehicle for the Stanford brand name, allowing him to expand his business to new markets...