Word: unbidden
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...announced topic of the conference was "The Shifting Power Equation," and for once - at least for me - it worked, coming unbidden to the mind during countless quick conversations. Whether it was the growing significance of the Asian economies as compared with the Atlantic ones, or the extent to which technology has distributed economic clout from producers to consumers - and in the media business, turned consumers into producers themselves - the idea of a power shift seemed neatly to sum up what was on people's minds. Some examples...
Imagine that a message plops unbidden into your e-mail In box. Imagine that 10 just like it soon follow, all with a fake return address, none from a name you recognize. You take umbrage. You let it be known on your website that the sender is a scurrilous spammer, a clogger of In boxes, a violator of the right to privacy. It is a small gesture yet one you believe is important in the war on spam, and besides, it makes you feel good...
...credit that he cannot quite bring himself to write a book as dull and flat as Everyman's concept seems to demand. His style repeatedly breaks its leash, as at the funeral, when the protagonist's brother gives a moving eulogy and his estranged son struggles violently against unbidden grief. But then the narrator interjects that there had been 500 funerals in New Jersey that day and that except for the aforementioned moments, this one was "no more or less interesting than any of the others." It's an astonishing passage: an author arguing, against the evidence...
...pleasure of looking at images of a thing accompanied by a smaller version of that thing can feel almost pornographic. Indeed, baby animals and sexy babes can both produce unbidden murmurs of pleasure. This is not a coincidence. Both kinds of images stimulate the brain's pleasure centers, the area that is also aroused by good food and psychoactive drugs. When people talk about being addicted to Cuteoverload or to the National Zoo's "Panda Cam," they aren't exactly kidding...
Bandini (Colin Farrell) is a writer who knows his subject--L.A.--but needs characters to animate it. That doesn't take long: strong-willed women keep showing up unbidden in his room, removing their clothes, tangling him in their sad fates. Vera (Idina Menzel), who loves Bandini's writing, needs someone to tend her wounds. Camilla (Salma Hayek), a Chicano waitress who can't read his words but has great body English, starts to lure Bandini away from his obsession with those beautiful golden-haired California girls...