What used to be a playful question tossed around by Republican operatives about Donald Trump's presidential campaign is now being taken far more seriously: Is it possible that he is trying to lose?
There was an irrepressibly playful atmosphere around the weekend-long iGEM Jamboree at M.I.T. — students strode around in team T-shirts or dressed up as bacterial mascots — and each year the winning team flies home with the BioBrick grand-prize trophy, a large aluminum Lego, which is passed from champion to champion like the Stanley Cup.
In their chairs, the mermaids became suddenly graceful and playful, zooming around as if they were back in the sea.
There is playful skittering around the keyboard, and the finale of the last piano concerto becomes a softly rolling pastoral.
The operators plan to keep the parody going, with graphics for Valentine's Day that will play off Google's custom of placing heartwarming, playful drawings around its logo letters.
That site is now closing down, and parents have been asked to download the videos by March 4. "We're proud to announce that our little toy company is pairing up with a great big team of tinkerers to empower GAJILLIONS of playful storytellers around the world," the company said in an announcement on its website.
From the moment Keating pokes his playful face around the corner of the classroom, strolls through whistling, and beckons the boys to leave it, he dares them to transcend the boundaries of the room itself and what it stands for: tradition and conformity.
Detroyer were very much the kind of band that a Brooklyn-based visual artist might base a playful piece of work around, as happened when a Brooklyn-based visual artist, also called Dan Bejar, inadvertently received some emails intended for the singer, then began posting photographs of himself recreating photos of Destroyer as part of a "web-based seach-engine intervention" called The Googlegänger.
Poking, messing around and playful antics are great for just joking around.
