WHEN we last met Heather Joyce, not quite two years ago, she was running around the Aura elementary school in Elk Township sticking a video camera in students' faces, helping them to create a sometimes ridiculous, sometimes touching morning newscast.
Phyllis Krasilovsky and Peter Spier's classic title The Cow Who Fell in the Canal is a "building" story that is funny, charming and also a touch ridiculous.
It's a sublimely beautiful interlude and a touch ridiculous, bringing to mind the blooms of a portentous rose bush in D. H. Lawrence's "Sons and Lovers" that "expanded in an ecstasy," a prelude to later forest rutting.
(Yes, that sounds a touch ridiculous, but I assure you that we'll encounter that argument, loudly and immediately).
The reviewer for the Los Angeles Times, Charles Champlin, noted that the novel "lacks the garish, outrageous, ridiculous, symbol-witted touch of the original article"; despite that, he still enjoyed the novel, commenting that it left "intact the reputations of both Messrs. Amis and Fleming".
The piece was funny, touching, ridiculous, and beautiful — all the things art students learned to avoid.
Even as Keeping Up With the Kardashians gained a following after its debut in 2007 and Made in Chelsea premiered in 2011, the characters were painted as ridiculous and out of touch.
Even before the Twitter age, it was only a matter of time until a player said something that instantly made all players look ridiculous and out of touch — think Patrick Ewing's "Sure, we make a lot of money, but we spend a lot, too" comment that became the eye-roller of the 1999 lockout.
Some of his touches are ridiculous.
It was the period of Hollywood's cultural aspiration, dutiful and gummy — ridiculous, no doubt, but touching, and perhaps too easy to mock now.
