Word: stolid
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...Stolid houses and spacious yards. The whir of hand-powered lawn mowers in the summer, the scrape of snow shovels in the winter. Romberg on the radio, dinner at the country club once a week, a trip to Paris once a lifetime. Dad wears vests, Mom wears funny hats, the maid nips at the cooking sherry (must speak to her about that). If their son makes eagle scout and one of his sisters pledges Kappa, does it really matter that the other daughter decamps for Greenwich Village and a scattershot involvement with "the arts" that her parents will never understand...
...neat freak, Nora a slob, so for a reel they play Oscar and Felix. She has no friends, his are nudgy -- this movie hates middle- class Jews a lot. Then the lovers must break up and make up, and the ho boy! becomes ho hum. White Palace settles into stolid ordinariness, after flirting with being a handsome essay on the grandeur of reciprocal lust...
...head as he sat at the conference table -- a nimbus of television light around his charcoal hair, the man enveloped in utter stillness, the most thorough self-possession I have ever beheld. Does 27 years in prison make a man so calm? As I listened to Gunter Grass (a stolid German with some huge gravity pulling him earthward) discussing the Nazis, my mind drifted to Vaclav Havel, who I decided is an alert woodland creature. Jimmy Carter shines with a likable sweetness, but he is tougher than you may think...
...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...