Word: twists
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Once past thirtysomething and A Year in the Life, TV's family album gets considerably bleaker. Fully assembled nuclear families are scarce on the season's new sitcoms; swinging singles and unattached parents are in. One new twist, however, is a trend to half-hour shows that eschew laugh tracks or live audiences and aim instead for the mixed moods of comedy-drama. The technique does not always work -- witness CBS's Frank's Place, a languid, unfunny variation on Cheers set in a New Orleans Creole restaurant. More promising is The "Slap" Maxwell Story, with Dabney Coleman...
...emotions are easier to evoke than fear and pity. But comedy is hard. It takes Astaire timing and kamikaze cojones to stand on a stage or a sound stage and do this: wear a novelty-store arrow on your head; blow up balloons, twist them into animal shapes and announce the resulting sculpture as "venereal disease!"; tap-dance maniacally when seized with an attack of "Happy Feet"; then build a movie career running variations on a character you might call the suburban jerk. And mainly this: wait bravely for years until your public gets the comic point...
...mines, discovered after one blasted a hole in the U.S.-owned tanker Texaco Caribbean, added a lethal new twist to Washington's showdown with Iran. The explosives were the first to be found in the Gulf of Oman, a vital staging area for ships plying the Persian Gulf. Although the U.S.-escorted Bridgeton struck what appeared to be an Iranian mine last month, that mishap occurred hundreds of miles inside the Persian Gulf. One result of the new danger was a change of heart by Britain and France, which decided to rush minesweepers to the region after...
...caption YOU FOOLS. British editions of The Economist ran an otherwise blank page with a box explaining that a review of Spycatcher was appearing in all 170 countries where the magazine has subscribers, except one. "For our 420,000 readers there," the editors wrote, paraphrasing Mr. Bumble in Oliver Twist, "this page is blank...
...putter in the 1960s. Solheim found that if a putter's club face is heavily weighted in the heel and toe but light in the center, putts tend to go straighter. Even if the ball is not hit in the center of the club, the putter usually does not twist much. Duclos has taken Solheim's idea a logical step further. In Slotline's Big Moment putter, the weight difference between the tips of the club and its center is twice as great as the differential in Ping putters. Slotline putters cost about $60 to $79, compared with...