Just after the footpath beside the school passes into the cool late afternoon shadows, a gentle cracking sound signals that Doud Sebet has arrived.
Durand's Baby-face Finnster visage (with permanently semi-pursed lips that make him appear to have been weaned on a pickle) and gentle, cracking voice belie a capacity for state-of-the-art violence, and his face, mildly pockmarked and creased along the sides of his lips like a ventriloquist dummy, give him an additional wooden-ness.
When Marin Alsop stepped on to the podium to conduct the Last Night of the Proms in 2013, surrounded by pink balloons, the heady applause that greeted her masked the gentle cracking of a glass ceiling.
This is the kind of gentle crack that Reagan used to relish, as does Mr. Thompson.
He was the first director to listen closely to the gentle crack in that well-bred speaking voice ("improperly placed," according to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts), and to register the wicked elongation of her vowels: "Oh now, don't say you can't go," a scarlet-clad Grace tells Ray Milland in "Dial M for Murder," lowering that final syllable into a two-toned croon.
As I skated, there was a gentle tinkling of cracking ice - somewhat unnerving, but nothing to be alarmed by because here you skate over meadow rather than open water.
Over the years, Mr. Strait's producers made small changes to reflect the times (lots of reverb on the drums in the 1980's, for example), but Mr. Strait's own warm, slightly melancholy style barely changed, whether he was cracking gentle jokes about former lovers ("All My Ex's Live in Texas," 1987) or telling a mournful love story ("I Can Still Make Cheyenne," 1996).
The cracked, gentle sincerity of "Care" feels reflective of the Internet: extreme tenderness that serves as an admission of frailty, exaltation as a charm against depression.
If this was an evocation of spring, it was no gentle pastoral, but a season of cracking ice, violent wind and burning sun.
This is a gentle cooling cycle that also helps prevent the cheesecake from cracking.
All three, at Homer's gentle insistence, cycled through their memories of their playing days, telling stories, cracking jokes, amiably mocking one another.
