Word: soberness
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...describe articulately what sets one "period" or theme in the work off from another. Jacob tends to rely on a shorthand composed of repeated, encapsulated jokes. "Needing the eggs" is her analytic code for a type of humor she never defines, but which can be deduced to be the sober, questing, wistful quality in Allen that sends him harking after illusions. Likewise, the Take the Money and Run gag in which inept crook Virgil Stark well whittles a soap gun in jail, only to have it dissolve in the rain, becomes the officiated symbol of Allen's early humor, heavily...
...career criminal" programs that successfully concentrate on locking away those habitual offenders. Such clarity of vision is already permitting a careful?and, yes, hopeful?assessment of exactly what prisons can and cannot be expected to do. Prisons are a mess, but they may not be irretrievable. Rather, a new, sober set of hopes is required. Prisons can be made clean and safe and fair, and they can be used more judiciously: decent prisons for society's most indecent members...
...given courage, a sense of adventure and a little bit of humor. I have had a wonderful life. I have never regretted what I did." The odor of bitter irony, intentional or not, arises from this simple declaration by Ingrid Bergman. She was a wise, sober and gifted woman, wryly self-aware in a manner unusual in her profession, gallant in a way that is rare anywhere. But once, many years ago, she had an extramarital affair with one of her directors-an event not without precedent in human history-and the shape of her life and her career...
...after. Says a friend: "It's best you avoid Clay when he's hung over. You go in at your own risk. He butts his head against the fence so hard sometimes that we have to go out and calm him down." Usually, that is enough to sober up Clay Henry, a 130-lb. black mountain goat...
...usually lost amid the Watt bombast and anti-Watt bombast. He claims to wish that opponents would "sit down and intellectually discuss a subject with me instead of screaming." Yet in fact, Watt's antipathy for environmentalists, whom he dismisses as "left-wingers," practically precludes any such sober give and take. "Jim Watt did not make an honest attempt to come to terms with our concerns," says Jay Hair, executive vice president of the largely Republican National Wildlife Federation. "He kicked us out and slammed the door behind...