Word: stolid
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Mars, toward the end, that Total Recall slows down to tie up its plot and provide each villain with an appropriately gruesome demise. It goes wussily misterioso when Quaid meets a Yodaesque guru. But even when the film flirts with becoming ordinary, it is propelled by the stolid charm of Schwarzenegger, who carries the whole movie as easily as a dumbbell between his fingers...
...well-known tastemaker in his own day, Louis Tiffany is now often confused with his father Charles. Charles was America's premier jeweler who founded Tiffany & Co., and son Louis (1848-1933) was born with a vermeil spoon in his mouth. Louis remains a shadowy figure, energetic and Victorian stolid. He married twice, had six children and became infatuated with building and decorating his 84-room mansion, Laurelton Hall, on Long Island. A perfectionist, he sometimes smashed work by his artisans that did not meet his standards...
Like many a great fight, this was not always a good fight. It was not so much a spectacular display by the challenger as a mediocre one by the champ. Tyson looked stolid, muzzy, otherwise engaged. He stood around like a fire hydrant in black shorts, an easy target for Douglas' advantages of height (5 1/2 in.) and reach (12 in.). The champ threw few punches, and fewer of his lethal paradiddles -- left-right-left-right! -- that turn his victims' heads into punching bags and their guts to soup...
...embodied Wall Street's gold-rush spirit of the 1980s more than Peter Cohen, the high-strung chairman of the investment firm Shearson Lehman Hutton. A short, cigar-smoking firebrand, Cohen transformed Shearson from a stolid retail brokerage into an investment-banking giant. Backed by American Express, which bought the firm for $360 million in 1981, Shearson grew from 11,000 employees to 47,000 by the mid-'80s. But Cohen's expansion drive proved unstable. Hurt by several missteps and the slowing pace of Wall Street dealmaking, Shearson's investment-banking revenue declined 27% last year, to $963 million...
...wretchedness of apartheid came when he was Education Minister during the 1976 Soweto riots protesting compulsory Afrikaans instruction in the schools. He stood resolutely behind the principle of separate but equal -- in practice unequal -- education. To the liberal press he was verkrampte -- unenlightened -- no different from the blunt and stolid Nationalists who never questioned the boilerplate of apartheid...