Word: smiley
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...looking about those wandering lines and shadings of ink." Some of this apparent earnestness is surely due to the strict laws that still govern letter writing. For all the talk of "netiquette" (which delights Miss Manners), e-mail has yet to succumb to the rule of a similar code: smiley faces and other vulgarities are allowed, and even the most stringent rules of grammar are regularly relaxed...
...idea of a long novel about horses and horse racing has all the appeal of an afternoon at a seedy OTB outpost, read on. For Jane Smiley's Horse Heaven (Knopf; 561 pages; $26) turns out to go down quite easily--more like a pitcher of mint juleps at the Kentucky Derby. Smiley, who has already given us an epic about Greenland, an academic comedy set in the Midwest and historical fiction about abolition, has as great a range and as much intellectual curiosity as any novelist writing today. In her latest book, she takes on a fresh topic...
...Training ("Do not see any fault anywhere...Do not hanker after signs of progress"). There are the rich owners, desperate to get their playthings to the Breeders' Cup, and the struggling breeders, the jockeys and the horse masseurs. And above all, there are the races, riveting set pieces that Smiley creates with a passion that cannot help being infectious...
...lame; the unassuming little chestnut wins a race. "A football game is one story, one day a week. That's boring," a track addict explains to his son. "A day at the races is thousands of stories, with grass around, trees around, a breeze, some mountains in the background." Smiley tells just a few of those stories, but it makes for a fine...
...Polypropylene, for instance, the plastic that has been around since the '50s, can be molded so smooth it is almost sensuous, and it takes dyes like silk. German design firms Authentics and Koziol have made much hay out of plastic's new pizazz. Koziol's spaghetti forks with a smiley face, ice-cream scoops with eyes and the "Tim" dish brush with legs are some of more than 300 "cutensils," as they're known, that flew off shelves of American stores last year...