Word: sideshows
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...most entertaining sideshow of the war in Kosovo is staged almost every day at the Pentagon's press briefing room. There exasperated reporters conduct jousting sessions with uniformed military commanders in vain attempts to divine the most banal of battlefield data information. How many NATO air strikes have been aborted because of bad weather? "I'm afraid I can't get into that level of detail right off the top of my head," Vice Admiral Scott Fry said at a Pentagon briefing early in the campaign. How about an approximation? "I'd prefer not to even approximate it." A ballpark...
...hard to understand why this works. Why would anyone pay for a book or a magazine just for scoops you already know about from the publicity? But people do. Partly they've been suckered by the sideshow barker's trick of implying that there's more inside when there ain't. But partly there is pleasure in holding and owning something that's making news, even if it's news you already know. And journalists love producing scoops for something like the same reason. There's a thrill in being the first to report something, even if it's basically...
...Boston Conservatory presents Bill Russell and Henry Krieger's Tony-nominated Side Show, a real-life tale of Siamese-twin sisters who escaped the sideshow circuit to find romance, happiness and fame in vaudeville. Emerson Majestic Theater, 219 Tremont...
...didn't much like being turned into a carnival sideshow, but he never let it distract him. When a reporter spotted androstenedione, a legal but controversial steroid, in McGwire's locker, the slugger explained that he used it to protect himself from the muscle tears that so often plague finely conditioned athletes, especially those few so well muscled as he, and he left it at that. Though he was criticized, McGwire marched ahead, not even pausing to rip off the head of the reporter who'd gone peeking into his locker. What kind of a modern athlete would fail...
Though outrageous and crude, the jokes in the Farrelly Brothers' most recent sideshow attraction are also intensely predictable, which keeps the movie from lifting off. Cameron Diaz, Ben Stiller and Matt Dillon all give their best shot to keeping the ball in the air, but for one thing, their presence is almost arbitrary in many scenes to the extent that Mary's humor is all visual and only rarely connected to dialogue; poor Cameron could be reciting Rilke beneath those "hair gel"-enhanced bangs and no one would know the difference. Then again, everyone else seems to have...