Word: appendix
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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What intelligent designer came up with cancer and toothaches? Who "designed" your appendix and tonsils, organs that do nothing but get infected and cause you grief? How intelligent is the famously fragile human spine, or the narrow pelvis that makes childbirth harder for humans than for almost any other species? There are evolutionary explanations for all of these, but I hardly think there was much intelligence in designing halitosis, acne and flatulence...
...linear or too sensible. That what-happened-after-the-story-ended appendix? Put it in the middle, as in the story "Lying Under the Apple Tree," so that the end of the narrative can have its full kick and bite...
...next time you pass through Logan, hand over your deodorant. But, remember, you’re more likely to be killed by your appendix than Al-Qaeda...
...that coincides with all the other would-be candidates' off-year limbering up? Surely he can't JUST want to save the world. Then there's how the movie, when not scaring the audience with the threat of the disappearance of Greenland (hint: not the continental equivalent of the appendix), casts Gore's life into the soft-focus glow most often associated with The Man From a Place Called Hope. His young days on the farm. Triumph over family tragedy. Determination and grace after humiliating defeat. And just as in a campaign ad, Gore carefully paints an unflattering picture...
...essentially a medical biography. It begins at its end: the protagonist's burial in a rundown Jewish cemetery in New Jersey near his parents. It then returns to the beginning, cataloging his brushes with mortality--a drowned sailor washes up near his boyhood home during WWII, a burst appendix nearly kills him in his 30s--then jumps to his old age, a parade of annual hospitalizations. In between, there's a life, including three failed marriages, several infidelities and artistic ambitions he set aside, but Roth draws them with uncharacteristic sketchiness. (A stretch of midlife health is described thus: "Twenty...