Word: banalities
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...other hand, Jerry Oppenheimer's Madoff with the Money (Wiley) reflects its tabloid title. Told with faux breathlessness, it reads at times like a quickly compiled clip job. On occasion, he uses the annoying supermarket-rag technique of quoting "Madoff insiders" for banal details, such as that Madoff liked expensive suits, in order to raise the level of suspense. But Oppenheimer can be good at the juicy quote too. One victim told him, "What were we going to do--call up Bernie and tell him, 'God, I'm making too much money. What's going on?'" Or the small detail...
...biggest job is the city's biggest township. Soweto is an acronym for South Western Townships, the banal moniker apartheid-era leaders bestowed on the dormitory city they created for blacks on the edge of town. The apartheid government decided blacks had no need for not only freedom, fair wages and a decent education but also roads, trees and houses. Soweto was a place of tin shacks and red dirt. As part of the effort to redress this legacy of inequality, the mayor has repaved Soweto's main roads, and Williamson invented his extreme park missions...
...turns out, are the domain of Seattle-based meme guru Ben Huh, 31. One of his staffers sent him a link to Hoekstra's original tweet, Huh says, and as the responses started flowing in he immediately saw meme potential in Hoekstra's juxtaposition of the horrific and the banal. "You can't really explain why it's funny, but it is," he says. Huh has not yet heard from Hoekstra, but he expects the congressman to be overwhelmed by satirical posts next time he logs online. "I'm pretty sure when he finally checks his Twitter account...
...user innovation," in which consumers actively modify a product to adapt it to their needs. In its short life, Twitter has been a hothouse of end-user innovation: the hashtag; searching; its 11,000 third-party applications; all those creative new uses of Twitter - some of them banal, some of them spam and some of them sublime. Think about the community invention of the @ reply. It took a service that was essentially a series of isolated microbroadcasts, each individual tweet an island, and turned Twitter into a truly conversational medium. All of these adoptions create new kinds of value...
...When the film was released in 1969, it was provocative. The 2009 German production ups the shock value of Nazi symbols and dancing blond chorus girls singing "Springtime for Hitler and Germany," but it is clear that today's audiences aren't so easily scandalized. "It was kind of banal," says Rainer Dietmar, 40, a librarian. "Is it O.K. if I say I didn't like...