Word: sobering
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...perhaps, given Vermeer's interest in music as a metaphor of harmonious love, her suitor) in black. You can gauge the depth of the room from the perspective clarity of its floor tiles. It is real, but at the end it becomes a paradise of abstraction, in the sober play of dark-framed rectangles of picture, mirror and the long lid of the virginal's cabinet...
...that if he hoped to change the world, he would need to change the Congress first. His problem was that the House was never intended to be very powerful; the Founding Fathers designed a legislative body that could boil over with parochial passions, only to be cooled by the sober Senate. Senators can filibuster; Presidents can veto. All the Speaker can do is create the appearance of momentum so that the rest of the government will...
...catastrophe worse than the invasions of the Tatars, Napoleon and Hitler combined." The mostly over-50 crowd, packed into the "culture palace" of a factory, constantly interrupts Zyuganov with applause, especially when he takes a gibe at Yeltsin and wonders out loud "why you have to be sober to drive a bus but not to run the country...
...already paid for by individual governments. A high official at U.N. headquarters in New York City is promoting the career of his mistress in a well-paid U.N. job. A key adviser at one of the U.N.'s most controversial agencies is said to be an alcoholic too seldom sober to do much work. And the head of a worldwide agency is reputed to have bought his job by handing out cash--bundles provided by his national government stuffed into a suitcase--to delegates from other countries who agreed to sell their votes...
Perhaps the finest of Copley's family portraits is that of Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Mifflin, done in 1773. Mifflin was a rich young radical Whig of Quaker origins, who would become George Washington's aide-de-camp and, after the Revolution, Governor of Virginia. The portrait is very sober in color--browns, grays and silver, the only bright note being a red flower pinned to Sarah Mifflin's bodice. What is especially striking about it is the way it preserves Quaker ideas of matrimonial equality. Conventional 18th century portraits have the wife looking adoringly at the husband, who looks...