"If you don't notice it, it's a success," observes Fernlund, the Swedish half of the team, who are building a reputation for their plain-spoken modernist design.
In a May report, Standard & Poor's applauded Egyptian lenders for their "plain-vanilla commercial banking products and services" that spared Egypt the ruinous asset bubbles that have derailed economies across on the European side of the Mediterranean.
Under the eyes of neighbors from Harlem and Hamilton Heights, a moving crew composed mainly of German Baptist Brethren from Pennsylvania, often mistaken for Amish in their plain dress, guided the two-story, 298-ton house on a 3 hour 40 minute trip from its former site on Convent Avenue.
There, the young people, holed up in the store, essentially play house, using the fancy sound systems on display to listen to pop music (and repeat celebrity-news banalities about it), exchange their plain outfits for designer clothing, bathe in a retro bathtub, take jewelry, don makeup, crash on fancy furniture, and luxuriate in the wide-open spaces of the full-block-size building.
A half-dozen small towns around Austin are regionally (and justly) celebrated for their barbecue -- plain little places in Luling and Taylor and Llano, where hearty hunks of meat cook for hours over smoldering wood fires, soaking up flavor.
The salespeople who push these things should have moved on to products more suitable for their clients, like plain old mutual funds.
But instead of repulsing voters, as the "play it safe" establishment assumes it will, it excites them, electrifies them, inspires them to go out and rally for their no-nonsense, plain speaking, tell-it-like-it-is guy.
Parents, he said, "have to take a look at their role in making sure they are participants one way or another in what's happening educationally for their child or children, plain and simple".
If black folks want to persist in concocting bizarre, alphabet-soup names for their kids (or just plain misspell their names), then expect other people to make fun of you.
