Word: surrealness
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...special because it overcame seemingly insurmountable odds with sheer will and determination. But sometimes a team is special not because of one spectacular moment but because it has consistently dominated its competition for the entire season--a team so far ahead of the pack that it seems almost surreal...
Stupidity is one of my favorite subjects. "It is always amazing," Jean Cocteau wrote, "no matter how often one encounters it." Like sleep, stupidity is a universal, surreal and mysterious phenomenon, a brownout, the mind passing through a tunnel. Sometimes stupidity is hilarious; most of the world's jokes are told by one ethnic group about the stupidity of another ethnic group. In its sinister forms, stupidity turns up as evil's incompetent half brother--evil without supernatural prestige. The "Evil Empire" was, in a more practical sense, the stupid empire; systemic stupidity, not evil or good, brought the Soviet...
Back when I was in school, the surreal fear hovering above our heads was about the atom bomb. Our duck-and-cover drills were designed to protect us, somehow, from the Big One. Nowadays, we drill our kids on what to do if a classmate goes nuclear. It's an unlikely scenario, just as the Bomb was. But when you eavesdrop on kids these days, there's the painful possibility you'll hear them speculating on who in their class might be most likely to play Doom for real. The shootings at Columbine, Conyers and elsewhere remind us that...
...This sudden fear of Chinese nukes really strikes me as ridiculous to the point of being surreal," says TIME Pentagon correspondent Mark Thompson. "They've had 23 nukes pointed at us all along. Is that not enough to do the job? This is a great political issue for Republicans, but if you peel away the rhetoric, not a thing has changed in terms of tactical advantage...
...fiberglass insulation. But Bernich, a resident of a once nice block in Moore, Okla., knew how lucky he was. Not 48 hours earlier, he, his wife and their two daughters had shut themselves in a small utility room, linked arms and prayed, knowing a monster loomed above. "It was surreal, time was frozen," he said. "It felt like the tornado was hovering over our house," which it was. Then the pause ended, there was a roar ("like it exhaled"), and Bernich's house imploded. The utility room and its inhabitants, however, survived. "We feel blessed," said Bernich...