Word: tales
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...rough-hewn setting for Irvine Welsh's 1993 novel Trainspotting, the decayed dockside district of Leith, Edinburgh, provided a wonderfully seedy backdrop for a grim tale of nihilistic, drug-addled youth. But today, just 15 years later, Welsh's characters would struggle to recognize the Scottish capital's old port area. That's because over the past decade Leith - lying two miles (3.2 km) northeast of the city center - has experienced a rapid renaissance thanks to the closure of the docks and the cleaning up of once polluted waterways. The addicts have been replaced by white-collar workers, who live...
...explored with nuance, carefully balancing tragedy and humor. With his breakout film, 1962's Il Sorpasso, about the unlikely friendship between a law student and a gregarious con artist, Risi became one of Italy's most accomplished directors, earning two Oscar nominations for 1974's Profumo di Donna, the tale of a blind war veteran able to distinguish women by their perfume. It was remade in 1992 as Scent of a Woman, starring Al Pacino. Risi...
...normalcy is refreshing, and it keeps the show light and funny. But it also makes her seem a little dull and shallow. The story strives so hard to make her unconflicted that she lacks the conflict a protagonist needs. Call Girl didn't need to make her a cautionary tale, but it might have benefited from a broader scope that told us more about her fellow escorts--those who don't, say, blithely name-drop Luis Buñuel flicks. In the Spitzer case, reporters eventually tracked down his regular date, "Kristen," an aspiring singer with a MySpace page. The drab...
...would have been interesting to see what Call Girl would have made of a character like this. As it is, it's just a tale of one woman, which doesn't pretend to tell us anything universal about the world's oldest profession. Except, perhaps, what TV shows like Top Chef have been telling us for a while now: that the customer-service business is hard work...
Obama's new rumor shredder makes it easy to find both the "lies" and the "facts" behind the "mystery tape rumor." Secondary pages note that "even some conservatives don't buy it" and list two well-read conservative bloggers who have debunked the tape tale. And in what is likely to be the most read part of the new site, the campaign cites the probable sources of the stories in a section called "Who's behind the lies?" As the Obama sleuths explain it, the "Michelle Obama Mystery Tape Rumor" appears to be a work of fiction lifted "almost word...