Explaining the absence of Seidl from Cannes prior to 2007, Haneke likened those films to "smelly socks.
"All Swedish people know each other, and I believe they're all in this room," said Johan Svensson, the art director of Jane magazine, explaining the absence of Americans.
"In our society, there is a great disconnect between people and books," Mr. Yunis said, explaining the absence of students in the American Corner.
Occasionally in such cases I have written explaining the absence of a published correction to any readers who complained; and occasionally a reply has come back along these lines: "Of course, I do understand.
This probably explains recent electoral successes of openly devout presidential candidates who previously demonstrated dubious ethics, while also explaining the absence of any serious candidates without known religious affiliation.
"We don't have enough manpower, and we won't use tear-gas against Jews," one officer said, explaining the absence of tear-gas and rubber bullets, routinely used by the Israeli security forces to break up Arab stone-throwing demonstrations.
The view that campus collegiality leads to tyranny of the majority has some plausibility in explaining the absence of Republicans from academia, but the main causes clearly lie elsewhere.
"It was so hot and so big that the cones completely became destroyed," said Jessica Gurevitch, an ecology professor at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, explaining the absence of pitch pine seeds in the most badly burned areas.
(Hey, that's why it's called acting!) That may go some way towards explaining the absence from the nominees' list of Broadway veterans Bebe Neuwirth and Nathan Lane, co-stars of the wanly received but hugely popular new musical, The Addams Family.
At a news conference on the show's opening day, Mr. Kubota, explaining the absence of scrawny corpses or "big-bellied babies" in his pictures, said he was not interested in "sensations" but in focusing on how people earned their bread (or rice) in the face of many obstacles.
The introduction of L69C and L69S substitutions into FhCatL5 resulted in low overall activity indicating their expression provides no functional advantage, thus explaining the absence of such variants in Fasciola.
