Word: spareness
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Suddenly, computers that had whirred quietly for years started making the strangest sounds. Some began to moo like a cow every hour on the hour. Others greeted each new program with the sound of breaking glass. Still others spent their spare moments doing celebrity impersonations: Ed McMahon belly laughing, Ronald Reagan mumbling, "Well . . .," George Bush advising that a particular keystroke "wouldn't be prudent" or Star Trek's Dr. McCoy spluttering, "Dammit...
Although modern farming in Russia is now almost completely mechanized, broken tractors and combines can languish for weeks or months awaiting spare parts. When the cacophony of the engines is silenced, peasants tune their work to the cadences of the land and return to the ageless methods of their forbearers...
While workers forego vacations because they can't spare any money at all, Reid says the closest administrators come to sympathizing is when they say, "I didn't take a vacation either this year because I bought a new Mercedes...
...contrast to the cinematically luxurious Greed, the libretto of McTeague -- by Bolcom's longtime collaborator Arnold Weinstein and director Robert Altman -- relates the action in spare, simple prose. McTeague (tenor Ben Heppner), a powerful brute who has set up shop as an unlicensed dentist in San Francisco, falls in love with his best friend Marcus Schouler's girl, Trina (soprano Catherine Malfitano, in a marvelously sensual performance). After Trina wins $5,000 in a lottery -- and McTeague's practice is ruined when the jealous Marcus (baritone Timothy Nolen) reports him to the authorities -- the relationship sinks slowly into a morass...
...with the grimness of the first generation of women lawyers, afraid to crack a joke about a client for fear of being sent back to the typing pool. To some, her marriage looked like a merger. Former candidate Michael Dukakis only read about Swedish land- use planning in his spare time; the Clintons talk about similarly dense topics with friends over dinner in the huge kitchen in the statehouse...