Inspector Rios said he liked the idea, "but I've seen them play soccer and I didn't want them humiliating our officers — I said, 'How about volleyball?' " He conceded that knocking around a ball might seem an oddly mild response to a deep-seated problem.
So, too, with the pork blood "curd," which is simply pork blood, congealed and cut into thin, purplish-black wafers that call to mind bruised tofu, springy and oddly mild, having somehow soaked up none of the raging broth they come submerged in.
On a mild, oddly boisterous night England and their temp-to-perm manager came close to pulling off a genuinely startling result at Wembley, leading Spain 2-0 before two late goals stilled the sense of a dawning coronation, with all the giddy uncertainties such a victory here might have brought.
He avoids ornament or surplus, and seems to welcome cliché, platitude, episodes as bland as milk, an atmosphere of oddly vacated calm whose mild persistence comes to seem teasingly or menacingly unreal.
On the nights I visited, oddly chewy Parmesan crisps were a mild distraction from an otherwise exemplary tortellini with airy white bean filling and a simple, gorgeous breakdown of Sungold tomatoes.
Oddly, the people holding them can be mild and soft-spoken when you talk to them, like Carvajal.
Their main characters are girls or young women engaged in various kinds of vileness: from mild deception, friendly torture and oddly benign bestiality to murder and mayhem.
Yet their portrait of the mild-mannered, Clark Kentish president is oddly contradictory -- or not so oddly, considering that one of Latin America's enduring mysteries is its ability to accommodate opposing realities simultaneously.
"Oddly oblique," he concludes, "The Hard Life reads as... a rather mild attack on the pretenses of Catholicism and an already vanishing social order".
But even such apparently drastic measures may have less to do with cleaning up the banks than with impressing western creditors and, oddly, tackling a tax dodge.The announcement of the closures put an end to a mild banking panic.
There is a mild disagreement over child-rearing, a hint of an affair (a scene that's oddly powerless in the Keen Company production), a moment of emergent women's liberation.
