There is, moreover, something too pat about many of her efforts.
Tonight the title track exudes bitterness, evil laughter and deranged keyboard horns: there is nothing pat about it.
There is something a little too pat about this narrative, and about the more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger spirit in which it is offered.
And where Mr. Schmidt and Mr. Cohen see promise in technology's effect on the Arab Spring, Mr. Lanier is sick of the back-patting about social networking.
There is something a little too pat about these works, but they show Ms. Amer experimenting with the figure and forging a connection between drawing and embroidery.
There's something pat about Pollono's writing — you could set your watch to the metronomic revelation of the characters' secrets and vulnerabilities.
That was how he made others happy and himself rich and famous.There was something cajoling about his prose, something pat about the sequences of events that he purveyed, something soggy in the beliefs he espoused.
But there is something pat about the movie's main conceit; Tremblay is startling, but you sense that the film is using a horrific plight (reminiscent of several real-life cases) to offer up a meditative study of childhood, and of just how much a child's view of things — first blinkered, then opening wide — can teach us.
But it plods along, with honking dialogue, one-note characterisation and clunking exposition that's shamefully pat about the ethics of filming the whole shebang (including a suggestion that the producer, divorced himself, forced the issue by revealing Bill's indiscretions to Patty).
China blocks Google services, search functions and Gmail for more than an hour as censors fire warning shot [Guardian] Compare and contrast Silicon Valley's silence on Chinese censorship with its virtual back-patting about the use of Twitter and social media to help Iranian protesters [Market Watch] plus will the world's computer makers succumb to the thought police in Beijing?
Gems had a thrifty housewife's attitude to her work, never throwing anything away and often recycling it: one of her final plays, Mrs Pat, about the relationship between the actor Mrs Patrick Campbell and George Bernard Shaw, was produced by the Theatre Royal in York in 2006, more than 15 years after she had first started writing it.
