It starts off promisingly.
It starts off promisingly enough with In the Machine, which is engaging and beautifully written.
It starts off promisingly enough and then turns into a sing-along chorus type of song.
It starts off promisingly enough, with green footpath signs pointing east along the riverfront, but it's not long before we're wandering around a dismal industrial estate, wondering if we've taken a wrong turn.
The book starts off promisingly, in the dim past.
The follow-up starts off promisingly, the title track press-ganging every military cliche to hand (sirens! A Last Post pastiche! "Your country needs you!" Bellows of "Atten-shun"!) for a call to arms for the world's women that turns into Battlestar by 90s boyband Five as it reaches its chorus.
While "Adam Haberberg" starts off promisingly as a sympathetic portrait of a writer filled with regrets about his life and art, it soon devolves into a kind of dumbed-down, user-friendly imitation of "Krapp's Last Tape" — Beckett Extra Lite, as it were, transported to the Paris suburbs.
The Scots were unlucky losers against France three weeks ago and even started off promisingly against Ireland before getting buried.
Last Sunday's episode about a family camping trip started off promisingly as a slick car dealer spotted the rubelike Simpsons approaching his camper display and murmured in fervent gratitude, "Thank you, God". But the trip itself soon became merely outlandish, with Homer covered in pond slime and being mistaken for Big Foot.
"It's definitely someone's dream; it's just not our dream," said Andrew McCaul, a 37-year-old photographer who moved from Ridgewood back to Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, in June -- exactly one year after buying a $580,000 three-bedroom Dutch colonial, in walking distance of town, with his wife, Sarma Ozols, 36, and their son Aidan, now 2. Their suburban sojourn started off promisingly in June 2004.
