Word: shriller
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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This whole vampires-vs.-zombies debate - about which monster is more vital to the pop-culture zeitgeist - has lately escalated to nuclear proportions. Both sides have gotten shriller and more dogmatic, as if they were wrangling over a public option in health-care reform or whether it's O.K. to tweet during sex. As someone who's amped up the decibel level on the creature-features subject (see my review of Thirst), I now believe the warring parties need to find some small patch of common ground. So can we agree on just one thing? A vampire movie (or novel...
...That squealing takes a distinctly shriller tone when their wedding planner - played by Candice Bergen, who has become to chick flicks what Joe Pesci is to Mafia movies, only statelier and with better diction - breaks the news to Liv and Emma that a scheduling conflict means their weddings will have to be on the same date in June. And so, she suggests, one of them will have to compromise and find a different venue. Needless to say, maturity does not win out, and the two Bridezillas turn on each other...
...Jazeera's Arabic channel has gradually been toning down its partisan rhetoric since 2003, when Qatar's Emir and al-Jazeera's founder, Sheik Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, a progressive ally of the U.S.'s, who is known to be privately dismayed by some of al-Jazeera's shriller broadcasts, started replacing members of the seven-member board of directors with reformers favoring a more straightforward approach. The board ousted founding al-Jazeera managing director Mohammed Jassim Ali, a Qatari who championed al-Jazeera's aggressive style and anti-Yankee tilt. As al-Jazeera executives see it, the channel...
...between the extreme left and the extreme right grows ever wider, the rhetoric becomes louder, shriller and more grandiose. It takes a bomb of an accusation, no matter how ridiculous, to get anyone's attention nowadays. The voters have heard little or no objective discussion of the candidates' platforms. Mike Stempo Bethlehem...
...Musharraf gave a speech against "wicked, bigoted" religious extremism, saying it could lead "to our own internal destruction." But even if he had his own reasons, once India demanded a crackdown, it became politically dicey for Musharraf to pull it off. "The shriller the Indians, the more difficult it is for Pakistan," notes a Western diplomat in Islamabad. Still, Musharraf's crackdown against the militants has at least impressed Washington. "It's real, and it's going to continue," says a senior State Department official...