Word: soft
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Occasionally an outburst of public opposition does change the inexorable march of progress, and not just in the soft-drink business. Experts in the automobile industry decided a few years ago that people no longer wanted convertibles (which were dangerous, besides), so they stopped making them. They ignored charges that they were tampering with the American way of life, not to mention the birth rate, but they did not ignore the rising price of used convertibles. So they started making them again. There was a time, similarly, when wrinkle-free plastic fabrics were supposed to replace cotton shirts forever...
...general idea that change is popular, and therefore increases sales, threatens all kinds of cherished institutions. If lots of people can destroy an institution by telling a pollster that they prefer soft drinks to be sweeter and lighter, will the next step be for meat-packers to start producing a low-calorie hamburger by just adding a lot of airy filler? And will somebody then try combining it with goat cheese? Is anything safe? Will Hershey bars be filled with raisins and Oreo cookies with pink icing? Will apple pie be made à la mode with Tofutti...
...preserve the drink. Now that Coke has answered that, it will manufacture both formulas on its own, and the new and the old can lie down together at last like the lion and the lamb in a peaceable kingdom (disturbed only by the rumblings of merciless competition by other soft-drink companies...
...leader, Nelson Mandela, has been imprisoned by the government since 1962. From exile, the acting heads of the 73-year-old nationalist movement have vowed to win independence by intensifying military action and by extending a sporadic sabotage campaign, so far directed more at property than people, to include "soft civilian targets." Even as Bishop Tutu delivered his cry of the heart at KwaThema last week, some youths, waving the black, green and gold colors of the A.N.C., chanted, "Give us weapons. We want to strike back at the state...
...grand piano in the middle of a hardwood floor, tickling the keys and tapping his white leather shoes to the beat of his memories. In striking contrast to the awkward, robot-like characters in earlier computer films, De Peltrie looks and acts human; his fingers and facial expressions are soft, lifelike and wonderfully appealing. In creating De Peltrie, the Montreal team may have achieved a breakthrough: a digitized character with whom a human audience can identify. --By Philip Elmer-DeWitt. Reported by Thomas McCarroll/New York and Dick Thompson/San Francisco