Word: torpid
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...three years, by a dazzling combination of talent, beauty and physical violence?when batting her eyelashes doesn't bring surrender, she lashes out with a karate chop?she has become a star. Her finest moments now may be when she plays the ingenue role in the show's arrestingly torpid "Pigs in Space" series, a send-up that is funny because it assumes, correctly, that the viewer is very bored by astronauts. Aboard the spaceship Swinetrek, she is every bit as lard-witted as Captain Link Hogthrob and the sinister Dr. Strangepork, and she is greedy for her rightful attention...
...traveling one has to do along the way--and the record's closer, a remake of the Zodiacs' mid-1960s hit, "Stay." In between, the songs are disappointing. "The Load-Out," a tribute to Browne's roadies, is nothing less than spectacularly dumb. Lyrically inane as well as musically torpid, the song includes such unbearably bad lines...
...fitness has produced its measure of snobbery, much of it directed at such harmless but torpid pursuits as golf and bowling. Neither, says the religion of wheeze and gasp, will do much for your cardiovascular system. (A golf course is about four miles long, and is negotiated, usually sitting down, at an average of 1 m.p.h. or less; at the professional level, tournaments are won by jiggling fat men. Bowling consists of brief bursts of slow motion separated by rest periods.) And fitness of the heart, lungs and circulatory system, far more than muscular strength and flexibility, is what...
...Torpid Tropics. That Grace is an anthropologist and trained observer is of great importance. Any other method of narration might have turned the novel into a pastiche of psychological and social pathology. To begin with, there is Charlotte's education as a norteamericana: "She was immaculate of history, innocent of politics. There were startling vacuums in her store of common knowledge. During the two years she spent at Berkeley before she ran away to New York with an untenured instructor named Warren Bogart, she had read mainly the Brontës and Vogue, bought a loom, gone home...
...Warren-and the FBI, which keeps pestering her about Marin's whereabouts. In Boca Grande she spends a good deal of time at the airport and the hotel pool. She involves herself in some social work, has an affair and attempts to introduce lively cocktail society into the torpid tropics. In the end. Charlotte fails to heed the unmistakable signs and explicit warnings that precede one of Boca Grande's periodic coups, and is shot by one side or the other...