Word: nondescript
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Whether it travels across borders or to the nearest big city, art stolen from churches takes the same route as art stolen from anywhere else. Relatively nondescript pieces - vases, silverware, small paintings - might be sold at a local antiques fair or online. A more impressive work will make its way up the criminal food chain, passed from the thief to his fence to a crooked dealer, who draws up a fake provenance, to a gallery owner, who turns a blind eye, and so on, until it lands on the legitimate market, eventually bought by a collector, who may have...
...evidence so far. If that is true, it raises questions about how closely the informant was supervised. (The U.S. Attorney's office declined to comment on the claim, citing the impending trial.) In addition, the informants' recording devices - which may have been embedded in cell phones or some other nondescript location - malfunctioned multiple times during the investigation, according to defense attorneys who have seen transcripts of the conversations. While some malfunctions are understandable, they can be a sign that the informant was censoring his conversations...
...career in investment banking, Roger Barnett made all the right moves: degrees from Harvard and Yale; jobs in London, Paris and New York City; and regular appearances in the society pages along with his wife Sloan. Today Barnett, 43, has a job at a direct-selling company in a nondescript office park about an hour inland from San Francisco. Like most people in direct sales, he has a touch of the evangelist about him. He really, really wants you to like the cleaning products, vitamin supplements and beauty products he's representing. Sloan, for her part, has been boosting...
Late last year, three world-renowned wine experts gathered in a nondescript, windowless room at Changi Airport in Singapore. For two days, they methodically worked their way through some 400 unmarked bottles of Champagne, Chardonnay, Cabernet and Merlot from around the world, pausing only to record scores on a 20-point scale. The test was one that required not only a trained palate but also a certain imagination. The judges had already sampled wines in a pressurized room that replicates the taste-deadening conditions at 30,000 ft., so they knew to choose softer, fruitier wines. After six bottles...
...most famously with the metaphor of the American “melting pot.” A crude assimilationist model of this ideal might have us believe that foreigners arrive in the United States via some sort of cultural liquidation sale, ready to absorb into a gloopy, grey and nondescript soup characterized primarily by football, Big Macs and turkey stuffing. A more preservationist version might resemble throwing a sack of stubborn potatoes into a (very) slowly simmering vegetable stew...