Word: workaday
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Putting aside the bizarre incidents - like the time an FBI informant set himself on fire in front of the White House in 2004 or the time a small plane crashed into the White House in 1994 - regular, workaday fires like the one that happened this morning in Vice President Dick Cheney's ceremonial suite at the Old Executive Office are not actually all that common on the White House grounds. Given the 27 wood-burning fireplaces, high volume of bureaucratic traffic and constant maintenance and refurbishing, it is not too bad a record...
...opera than a lurid plot twist. Unlike their glossy American counterparts, British soaps like the long-running, top-rated EastEnders traditionally aim for stolid social realism, depicting ordinary folk pursuing humdrum lives. Now, though, dwindling audiences are spurring EastEnders' producers to unleash implausible killers and gothic disasters on their workaday protagonists. In a recent plotline, a character was taken hostage by his deranged stepson and saw his wife shot as she came to his rescue...
There's no surer sign of a fading soap opera than a lurid plot twist. Unlike their glossy American counterparts, British soaps traditionally aim for stolid social realism, depicting ordinary folk pursuing humdrum lives. Now dwindling audiences are spurring producers to unleash implausible killers and gothic disasters on their workaday protagonists. Take the hapless citizens of Walford, a fictional London borough that is the setting for EastEnders, one of Britain's top-rated soaps. Recent episodes have seen a troubled adolescent kidnap his estranged stepfather, chip-shop owner Ian Beale, to exact revenge for his psychopathic mother's death...
...only in character and only occasionally, such as in The Devil Wears Prada. O.K., how about Emmylou Harris and Jamie Lee Curtis ... and that woman on the Food Network, Paula Dean, and ... and ... O.K., but that's show business. Surely there are nationally famous gray-haired women in more workaday fields, in business and politics and the professions? Uhhh ... Barbara Bush? In fact, we have almost no high-profile, female, gray-haired role models...
Mention the words Philippines and musicians in the same breath, and the world reflexively thinks of jobbing balladeers and journeymen lobby trios. Like most stereotypes, these are both true and untrue. Filipino hotel entertainers proliferate across the globe, but they are merely the workaday exports of a culture that, on its home turf, plays louder, harder and in more diverse ways than just about any other. Head out most nights in Metro Manila, and you'll be spoiled for original live sound, be it R&B, indie pop, electro-fusion or punk...