Word: weirdness
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While the rest of the neighborhood wonders when it will be wired for cable and settles down for another dose of network gruel, the weird piece of machinery across the way is pulling down programs from at least three pay-TV companies. Plus "feeds" from network correspondents hours before the evening news gets on the air. Plus NASA transmissions of pictures from Saturn. Plus soccer from Brazil. Plus the glorious miscellany of perhaps 50 to 60 programs a day, from closed-circuit prizefights to S.R.O. symphony concerts that are beamed off whichever satellite is being tuned...
...with lowlife, and scratching for crumbs of patronage at the skirts of the nobility-gave him limitless opportunities for satire. Traversi's two paintings of education in the arts, one showing a girl at the harpsichord, the other a young woman learning to draw, are vinegary, weird and hilarious all at once. It is as though the talents of a Longhi had been conjoined with those of Hogarth, and the result applied to Naples and its seedy corps of connoisseurs and minor literati...
...fight brain-fade by sizing up customers ("definitely a Swiss orange-chip person") the way soda jerks used to do. "The other day a guy came in and ordered a frappe with vanilla and mocha-chip ice cream, vanilla syrup, marshmallow sauce, hot butterscotch and an egg. That was weird." Her word frappe here is a Frenchified New England term for what Midwesterners call a milkshake...
...They think we're all crazy, on drugs, weird, strange, deranged." Pause. "Pretty well sums up my life." He tells the audience about flying into Atlanta in 1971, dressed in his Army uniform: "I was walking through the airport. This guy comes up and calls me a warmonger and a murderer. He called me that!" Another pause. "So I killed him." The audience explodes with laughter...
...getting ready to leave. The dealership has been opened extra late to accomodate crowds. Inside you can hear Elvis doing "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" over the Delco system. Another one of those haunted Civil War songs. One by one the flourescent lights go out. There's a weird orange sodium vapor lamp glow over the city ten miles away. The cicadas are going crazy in the heat. It is terribly still and terribly wide open. There's been a bag lady outside the window all night, and everyone's been making fun of her. God knows...