"We decided, let's try to do that for humans," Dr. Blander said.
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She'd previously signaled overall support for carbon pricing but in blander terms.
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In other words, nothing too out there, which means the blander the better.
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Starbucks opening means things are getting blander, more expensive, and probably more white.
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But let not the sins of the past punish us with a blander future.
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Commercially-produced tomatoes have gotten blander and even less sweet in the past decades.
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We humans are all bland faces blending into a sea of even blander faces.
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America goes on, the accents getting better and the truck-stop vegetables getting blander.
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The unrealized potential makes the rote line style and stagnant backdrops seem all the blander.
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STU BLANDER NEW YORK ♦ What book would you recommend for America's current political moment?
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In FiDi especially, it&aposs easy to pay the same amount for considerably blander accommodations.
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The real world will be replaced with a blander background, but the battery benefit is worth it.
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The Cortés of the young Ross Katen was blander and his Maximilian more pitiful, hopeful, blindsided by fate.
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But sadly, WB is probably interested in taking the film in a more family-friendly (read: blander) direction.
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She suggested starting the day by eating soda crackers, the blander the better, because smells can cause nausea.
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Then Pinterest made the look ubiquitous, and builders made it suburban, rolling out ever larger and ever blander imitations.
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Is it that the blander, more business-like face of internet privacy is welcome in the post-Cambridge Analytica era?
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This environment also dries up the mucus in our nose that assists in smelling, making the food taste even blander.
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In 2014 voters rejected a blander version of Mr Temer's reforms, put forward by the PSDB's losing candidate, Aécio Neves.
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Some of the writing is blander than it needs to be, and she has a soft spot for worthy proclamations.
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Other rolls followed this format: lots of rice with fish pressed on top, like a simpler, blander version of oshizushi.
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The show is more a watered-down, much blander version of the comic than a satisfying page-to-screen transition.
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Other characters don't quite get that level of attention (Thor, somewhat; Star-Lord, somewhat more), making their stories a bit blander.
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The journey led the baddest boxer in the world to shake hands with Gerald R. Ford, one of the blander presidents.
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WINNER: Wegmans — Though it was subtle, the Wegmans chip had more of a vibrant taste than the blander Trader Joe's chip.
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In recent decades the party has downplayed the iconoclasm of the May 4th Movement, preferring to portray it as something far blander.
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While some prefer lighter, blander meals that are easier on the stomach, others gravitate towards spicier, hotter foods to sweat out toxins.
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As a simpler—and, the purists would say, blander—wine, rosé is seen as a lighter drink, particularly when chilled in summer.
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Its tenants are blander today: N.Y.U. uses some of the space, and a large REI store occupies a chunk of three floors.
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Polling guru Nate Silver suggests that boycotting Carlson will lead to ever more boycotts culminating in a blander media landscape: Jack is right.
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Clearer, lighter and blander than the Bavarian lagers that had previously dominated the market, pilsners looked cleaner, healthier, more stable and less intoxicating.
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Still, it's easy to imagine an alternate reality where someone blander played Troy as a straightforward dumb jock with a heart of gold.
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She gave Kennedy fake Emma Stone because she can dance, and she was blander in that role than a bad bagel soaked in milk.
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But it has to be said that Britney's slower songs — which rarely qualify as ballads — are often much blander than her higher energy songs.
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Could any committee have come up with a blander and less arresting title for a show, anything less buoyed by the wings of poetry?
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It usually ends up making programming blander, as networks chase shows that will reflect well on the brand, not necessarily shows that are well made.
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The laptop has a much more premium look and feel than its predecessors — even if it does look a bit like a blander MacBook Pro.
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Three years ago I figured their last album for a triumphant fluke and expected their electropop to get a lot blander and more pro forma.
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Though the Joe-Joe's had a thicker creme layer, they had a blander taste than the Oreos and didn't fare well in the milk test.
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Take away the dating-app jokes, and the humor is, if anything, blander and more predictable, the jokes more obvious, the reaction shots more ubiquitous.
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The best we can hope for is that the FBI holds some kind of bland press conference with an even blander explanation, and that'll be it.
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Their new album and major label debut, an even blander and more booming pastiche of rock noises, dives headfirst into a big, soaring, inarticulate, cathartic void.
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Steve Hartmann and Kenneth Christmas basically told the Yale Daily News that Kavanaugh's palate couldn't have been blander if he were made entirely from cottage cheese.
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Like other white performers of their generation, they recorded what critics called blander (but often better-selling) covers of rhythm-and-blues hits by black artists.
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And even if her instinct is to select the lowest-risk option, the assumption that the blander, less ideological candidate is the safer one is pat and undercooked.
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These are things that would aid and clarify Catherine the Great's arc, but the narrative is too packed with blander events to support itself with what's already available.
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It is rich in vitamins and minerals and contains all the nutrients a newborn needs, but it also has less lactose and is blander than mature breast milk.
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Dining | Connecticut Whether we realize it or not, most of us patronize Asian restaurants where the cuisine has been tamed — made blander and more familiar — to suit American palates.
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One of the incidents he cited was a request by Ms. Lynch to use a blander term to publicly describe the investigation in the midst of a presidential election.
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"I think you're going to see a bill that's blander, more down the middle and it doesn't carry the weight of McCain's convictions," said Bartels, who is with the Heritage Foundation.
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But my real concern is whether the show can establish a strong identity for itself the way Marvel's other Netflix series have, because this trailer feels a lot like a blander Daredevil.
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If we have to have jukebox musicals, and it seems we must, I'd rather have a dozen Jagged Little Pills that don't quite work than a dozen blander, frothier musicals that do.
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Performing as her teenage self, she compares the Constitution to a magic crucible, while her competitors propose blander interpretations of the document as a patchwork quilt or a forest of living trees.
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But newsfeed content became blander over time as people's contact list grew to include their bosses and their local fruit seller who needs to be added as a friend to process WeChat payments.
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Ranging from "Always Be Hustlin'" to "Super Pumped," they read like Amazon's leadership principles run through a bro-speak translation engine; now they have been made into a blander set of eight platitudes.
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Coster-Waldau seems to have the light-comedy chops to maybe turn his Horus into a reluctant hero Han Solo lite-lite-lite-lite-LITE type, but the movie keeps steering him into blander territory.
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Where they deviate from the legend is that they all somewhat quickly lost the distinction of being a tall point guard, and instead blended into the somewhat blander tale of the Pretty Good Playmaking Wing.
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Mr. Volker, who offered a blander description of the meeting in his original testimony, plans to say on Tuesday that he does not challenge any of the new testimony but did not remember hearing the comments.
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While it certainly didn't feel like good news at the time, the financial crisis of 2009 to 2013 spawned a change in Spanish consumption from bigger and blander global brands to better, bespoke and distinctly local design.
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As the documents reveal, Apple's guidelines for Siri are all seemingly based on the guiding principle of ensuring that Siri is neutral and uncontroversial — even if it means offering blander responses that don't engage with the issue.
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The process is too labor-intensive (it takes half an hour to make a pound of poi) to recreate at scale, so these days, commercial producers put it through mills, churning out poi that's smoother and — some purists say — blander.
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And in the grand tradition of sharply funny sidekicks passed over for blander heroines like Lucy, every moment Emily Lacey's onscreen is another moment I remembered that she isn't onscreen all the other moments, and what a damn shame that is.
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The feature is a wise way to counteract the natural social graph creep that occurs as people accept social networking requests out of a sense of obligatory courtesy from people they aren't close to, which then causes them to only share blander content.
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Though its affiliations have made it a genuinely buzzy destination, anyone expecting the same cool factor may be disappointed: both the building and the dining room have the sprawling, swanky, but slightly sterile vibe of a luxury hotel in a blander city.
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Indeed, the weirdest part of Christman's argument, in particular, comes when he suggests that artistically adventurous films like Moonlight or The Witch are routinely praised by critics, where TV critics tend to champion blander, less adventurous work, when nothing could be further from the truth.
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Indeed, this year's Academy Awards ceremony, which gave the Best Picture award to Moonlight, seemed to help counter a traditionally bland awards system that tends to favor blander, bigger films over outsider films — though most of the evening's honors went to the favorite, La La Land.
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But it makes for a much blander, much less interesting broadcast when the network doesn't seem all that interested in the fact that sports are about rise and fall — or the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat, as Wide World of Sports used to have it.
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Brody tried to refashion himself as a blander sort of leading man by playing action-hero for Peter Jackson's King Kong, and while the film was a hit, a forgettable performance contributed to him falling out of favor with the arbiters of cinematic taste who once celebrated him.
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After her 1968 masterpiece (and commercial flop) "The Delta Sweete," a borderline psych-folk concept album haunted by death and spirituality, she veered toward blander pop, but she took over songwriting and production for her last album, "Patchwork," in 1971, a suite of elaborately orchestrated character-study songs.
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The change from the colorful eggs to the blander silhouette is an intentional one by Twitter, which noted that the new image is specifically meant to be less interesting and feel more like a placeholder, in an effort to encourage users to customize their profiles to a more unique image.
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But the truth: Some Canadians spent the better part of the last decade envying an America led by Obama (who, objectively, is far hotter than JT by the way) while they watched a blander, more sinister, and entirely Canadian version of George W. Bush run their country into the ground.
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By eschewing some of its blander, forgettable shows (Men at Work, Sullivan & Son) and focusing on comedies that aren't as broad in appeal, the network's learning how to become more FX and less CBS—to stand out with high-quality programming instead of churning out programs simply to fill a schedule.
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As a nascent constructor raised on a diet of crossword blogs, I picked up their entry fetish, where their writing focused only on the hottest words in the themeless grid while overlooking the creative pop of the clever clues, which could make blander entries like CEASE-FIRES or CEL come alive.
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It's segregated by what we'll call culture: first six pop-metal warhorses whose Queen-Bon Jovi-Journey-Kiss-Survivor-Europe titles you can fill in yourself, then seven somewhat less reliable dance-rap bangers, after which sole woman Pink's best-in-show "Get the Party Started" transports us into a three-track country finale that left me wondering how I'd missed Sam Hunt's off-concept "House Party" and concluding once and for all that Jason Aldean is a blander, less macho Luke Bryan.
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Alanna Nash of Entertainment Weekly, in her review of No Doubt About It, called the song a "blander-than-generic ballad".
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Homogenized milk tastes blander but feels creamier in the mouth than unhomogenized. It is whiter and more resistant to developing off flavors. Creamline (or cream-top) milk is unhomogenized. It may or may not have been pasteurized.
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Although it is blander than most Tex-Mex dishes, it has long been a favorite dish in Texas club cookbooks and lunchrooms. "A Taste Of South Texas In A 9x13 Dish", All Things Considered, January 16, 2014.
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494, 845e861. Increased extracellular acetylcholine from interneurons in the NAcc have been found to be associated with the discontinuation of eating,Mark, G.P., Blander, D.S., & Hoebel, B.G. (1991). A conditioned stimulus decreases extracellular dopamine in the nucleus accumbens after the development of a learned taste aversion. Brain Res. 551, 308e310.
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" The three-star-and-a-half ratings come in from Akinola of The Christian Manifesto and both Jesus Freak Hideout reviewers. The Christian Manifesto's Akinola called the effort "more 'meh' than 'marvellous'. I expected something new, fresh and exciting. I got something that wasn't bad, but definitely blander than what I hoped for.
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It would almost take 500 years to finish this shrine through the work of famous sculptors: Arnolfo di Cambio, fra Guglielmo Agnelli, Niccolò dell'Arca, the young Michelangelo, Girolamo Coltellini and Giovanni Batista Boudard. The expressive face of saint Dominic, so different from the more blander faces in the front panel "Saint Dominic resurrects Napoleone Orsini", is attributed to Arnolfo di Cambio.
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Bright Cheng had been more imaginative than Coughlin in borrowing "echt Bernstein effects". Indeed, it was not clear that a second orchestration of the cycle had been needed. Nor should the album's performances escape a degree of censure. Thomas Hampson and Frederica von Stade were "more opulent vocally" than their rivals on other recordings of the cycle, but also "mostly blander".
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She also shows that Lamy was probably hired to make the manuscript more lavish, since marginal ornamentation was atypical of Apocalypses. From these miniatures it has been possible for art historians to characterise Lamy's work in terms of phases. In the miniatures, his early work, the figures are brightly coloured and softly outlined, although they have been compared unfavourably as "blander" than Bapteur's.Edmunds, 136.
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It can also be found in steaks, chunks, or whole. Fresh striped bass is available year-round, and is typically sold in sizes from two to fifteen pounds, and can be sold up to fifty pounds. Striped bass has firm and flavorful flesh with a large flake. The hybrid striped bass yields more meat, has a more fragile texture, and a blander flavor than wild striped bass.
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They will also have brown ridges at the edges and feel firm. Fruits picked while still slightly green will turn yellow in storage at room temperature, but will not increase in sugar content. Overripe carambola will be yellow with brown spots and can become blander in taste and soggier in consistency. Ripe sweet type carambolas are sweet without being overwhelming as they rarely have more than 4% sugar content.
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Indeed, producers seem to be engaging in a "Loudness War," with the intention of attracting more and more audience members. Old hits are re- recorded with simpler chord progression and increased loudness using different instruments to sound new and fashionable. While the music industry has long been accused of producing songs that are louder and blander, this is the first time the quality of songs is comprehensively studied and measured.
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The earliest recorded mention of the wine appears in the archives of record of San Gimignano from 1276. Due to the difficulties in cultivating the Vernaccia grape, the wine fell out of favor in the early 20th century as the more prolific Trebbiano and Malvasia grapes were planted. By the 1960s, Vernaccia di San Gimignano experienced a resurgence as its distinctive, crisp qualities established it as a popular alternative to the blander wines produced from Trebbiano and Malvasia blends.
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In the early 80s, he turned more to old-time music again and often worked and recorded with Brian Golbey. He commented that "with the advent of New Country, line dancing and blander performances, our picking and grinning style was regarded as a novelty." During the mid-80s, Strutt played part-time with various units, including a swing quartet, but returned full-time in 1990. He began teaching guitar, mandolin and bass and appeared regularly with Hague's band.
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By the eighteenth century, Spanish cuisine had evolved a blander taste that departed from its spicier culinary roots. This served as a contrast between Mexican cuisine at the time of the Mexican Revolution. Instead of further changing their cuisine to match that of Spain, patriotism in the new country led Mexicans to embrace their history of spicy foods, using chile as an integral part of many dishes. This marks one of the first major differences between the new Mexican nation and Spain.
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Endless Love has received negative reviews from film critics. Criticism was mainly made towards the many liberties taken with the original source material. On Rotten Tomatoes the film has an approval rating of 16% based on 93 reviews, with the consensus: "Blander than the original Endless Love and even less faithful to the source material, this remake is clichéd and unintentionally silly." On Metacritic, the film has a score of 30 out of 100, based on 32 critics, indicating "generally unfavorable reviews" from critics.
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Lyrics referring to the United Nations and non-English-speaking countries building their own nuclear arsenals were changed in the Sons of the Pioneers recording, and replaced with blander lyrics about people coming together to end the threat of nuclear war.Wolfe and Akenson, Country Music Goes to War, 2005, p. 116-117. Fred Hellerman made a recording for the Jubilee label, and Ozzie Waters recorded one for Coral (a Decca subsidiary label). Even Bing Crosby was rehearsing a version to be released by Decca Records.
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Between O'Keefe's last major hit in 1961 and Billy Thorpe's first hit in 1964, the local rock music scene had become blander and more conservative. The charts were dominated by clean-cut acts, many were regular guests on TV pop show, Bandstand (1958 to 1972), and toured as members of the "Bandstand family", most were signed to Festival. Bandstand explicitly "appealed to anyone from eight to eighty". An alternative to mainstream pop acts were instrumental surf groups, for instance The Atlantics and The Denvermen in Sydney, and Melbourne's, The Thunderbirds.
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The game received positive reviews. IGN gave the game a 7.2/10, praising the NFL Films score, though commenting about the Madden engine being "not as pretty as other football games". On the contrary, GameSpot praised the engine, though criticizing the multiplayer; GameSpot also graded the game as 7.2/10. CNET scored the game 3.5/5 stars, also praising the NFL Films score, though commenting that the on- field action is blander than usual due to the lack of in-game announcers, along with some occasions when players are negatively motivated after positive motivation.
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In the process of revision, Raspe's prose style was heavily modified; instead of his conversational language and sportsmanlike turns of phrase, Kearsley's writers opted for a blander and more formal tone imitating Augustan prose. Most ensuing English-language editions, including even the major editions produced by Thomas Seccombe in 1895 and F. J. Harvey Darton in 1930, reproduce one of the rewritten Kearsley versions rather than Raspe's original text. At least ten editions or translations of the book appeared before Raspe's death in 1794. Translations of the book into French, Spanish, and German were published in 1786.
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Jon Pareles of The New York Times called Original Soundtracks 1 "a collection of sketched songs and free-form instrumentals" in which "Bono stays quiet and smoky-voiced". Pareles went on to say that "Your Blue Room" "harks back to the Velvet Underground's "Pale Blue Eyes"". Jim Faber of New York's Daily News was less receptive to the album saying, "It can't speak well of an album when the artists involved won't even put their real names on it." In regards to "Your Blue Room" Faber said it "sounds like one of Lou Reed's blander ballads from the '70s".
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In 2011, Andrew was part of a pyrotechnic stunt with motocross superstar Robbie Maddison performing a backflip on his motorcycle while Andrew presented the event for Cartoon Network's Hall of Game Awards. Andrew presented Cartoon Network’s live-action show Destroy Build Destroy. Andrew had a cameo on Cartoon Network's Mad, in the episode "Kung Fu Blander / Destroy Bob the Builder Destroy," which spoofed only Bob the Builder In 2014, Andrew appeared on Fuse TV's Insane Clown Posse Theater with Insane Clown Posse. Andrew also starred in Lil BUB's Special Special on Animal Planet alongside Lil Bub herself and Amy Sedaris.
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While Ashkenazi cuisine as it is known today is largely based within the context of American-Jewish and Ashkenazi-Israeli food, much of the culinary tradition of Ashkenazi Jews springs from Central and Eastern Europe. After having been expelled from Western Europe in the Middle Ages, Jews were forced to live in poverty and thus were limited in terms of ingredients. Dishes were made with fewer components; they were not heavily spiced and ingredients that were more flavorful had to be used sparingly. This is often why some dishes in Ashkenazic cuisine are known for being blander than dishes in Sephardic or Mizrahi cuisine.
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While Ashkenazi cuisine as it is known today is largely based within the context of American-Jewish and Ashkenazi-Israeli food, much of the culinary tradition of Ashkenazi Jews springs from Central and Eastern Europe. After having been expelled from Western Europe in the Middle Ages, Jews were forced to live in poverty and thus were limited in terms of ingredients. Dishes were made with fewer components; they were not heavily spiced and ingredients that were more flavorful had to be used sparingly. This is often why some dishes in Ashkenazic cuisine are known for being blander than dishes in Sephardic or Mizrahi cuisine.
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" Farber said that some of the incidents in the script "are bizarrely funny" but "[Allan Moyle] fails to provide the energy necessary to keep us involved." Farber described the film as "frenetic and convoluted rather than pleasingly impudent." Speaking of the cast, Farber said "the cast is generally better than the material", "Speedman and Bentley...demonstrate more charm incarnating these grungy characters than they have sometimes shown in blander heroic parts", and also said "Manning...is wasted here." Farber said "plotting is far too haphazard to hold the audience's attention" and wrote "some of it is funny-weird, but too much is pointlessly weird.
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Knowledge of Chekhov will increase the enjoyment of this work's in- jokes, but not as much as an understanding of Durang's absurdism, according to Theatermania.com's Brian Scott Lipton. Brantley noted that the work was suitable for any audience: "Even if you’ve never read a word of Chekhov, you’re likely to find plenty to make you laugh: Mr. Hyde Pierce’s skillfully low-key comic discomfort; Ms. Nielsen’s segues from manic eruption into glazed smiling stupor; Ms. Weaver’s game sendup of every self-loving, self-doubting movie queen there ever was." He noted the play does not compare with some of Durang's most absurd work, calling it "blander and thinner".
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The term "artificial intelligence" (AI) was coined in 1955 by John McCarthy when he and other computer scientists were planning a workshop and did not want to invite Norbert Wiener, the brilliant, pugnacious, and increasingly philosophical (rather than practical) author on feedback mechanisms who had coined the term "cybernetics". The new term artificial intelligence, writes Kenneth Cukier, "set in motion decades of semantic squabbles ('Can machines think?') and fueled anxieties over malicious robots... If McCarthy... had chosen a blander phrase—say, 'automation studies'—the concept might not have appealed as much to Hollywood [movie] producers and [to] journalists..."Kenneth Cukier, "Ready for Robots? How to Think about the Future of AI", Foreign Affairs, vol.
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Although the comic remained popular with its readers, its days were numbered. Pressure from within IPC's higher management over worries that the two major national newsagent chains, W.H. Smith and John Menzies, would refuse to stock not just Action, but all of IPC's line, led to the 23 October issue (the 37th) being pulped. After one month of planning, the title returned to sale on 27 November 1976 (cover date 4 December), but the graphic violence had been toned down, and the previous sense of anarchism was replaced by a safer, blander and more conventional feel. Most of the existing stories continued but were no longer drenched in blood and gore, and instead were full of more reliable heroes and traditional villains.
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Tom Warren of The Verge called the Lumia 925 "[a] reliable workhorse", praising the overall design but criticising some decisions like the lack of colours or the placement of the loudspeaker. While the Windows Phone ecosystem was said to be "still lagging behind on the software front", the review commended the strong out-of-the-box software experience, in particular innovative new features like Glance and Smart Cam. Mat Smith of Engadget considered the Lumia 925 to be an all-round improvement on the Lumia 920, but reported having mixed feelings about the colour scheme, describing the phone as "a lot safer, design-wise, and, well, a little blander than what we've seen before". The review also highlighted the Smart Camera app that debuted with the Lumia 925, as well as the energy-saving benefits of an AMOLED display.
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The Winograd Commission (; the commission's official name is הוועדה לבדיקת ארועי המערכה בלבנון 2006 – "The commission of inquiry into the events of military engagement in Lebanon 2006") is an Israeli government-appointed commission of inquiry, chaired by retired judge Eliyahu Winograd, which investigated and drew lessons from the 2006 Lebanon War (or the Second Lebanon War as it is known in Israel). The Committee had its first plenary session on 18 September 2006 and began summoning and hearing testimonies from witnesses on 2 November of that year. On 30 April 2007 the Commission released its preliminary report, harshly criticizing key decision-makers. At the same time, it has been praised as testimony to the fortitude of Israel's democracy and ability to self-criticize,Dana Blander, "Main Issues in the Interim Report of the Winograd Commission", Israel Democracy Institute, 7 May 2007.
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Rae Votta of Billboard, on the other hand, said that by having "Props" and "Nationals" air back to back, "they both lose their individual potent high points and come out blander than they deserve", and characterized "Nationals" as "jarring and strange". Both Huffington Post Crystal Bell and Washington Post Jen Chaney wanted to "be honest" about Vocal Adrenaline vs. New Directions in the competition: Bell said that Vocal Adrenaline "put on the better show" and Chaney wrote that they were "better than New Directions": "their dance moves were sharper and more in sync, and Unique's Minaj-esque magnetism factor sold the whole thing". VanDerWerff wrote that he "could quibble that Vocal Adrenaline had stronger choreography overall" or that he "found Unique a more engaging performer than Rachel", but that as "New Directions also used its whole ensemble better than Vocal Adrenaline did", he felt that "either outcome seemed reasonable".
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In a contemporary review of Behaviour, Jim Farber of Entertainment Weekly wrote that the album contained the Pet Shop Boys' "best tunes yet" and "their most consistently beautiful melodies to date", noting "an easier way with the beats and greater vulnerability in the lyrics" compared to the group's prior work. Greg Kot of the Chicago Tribune stated that Behaviour "may strike some listeners as even wimpier and blander than earlier releases, but its subtle brilliance emerges with repeated plays", calling it "a record that'll seduce dance clubs for a few months, and haunt the stay-at-home crowd for long after." In a mixed review, Robert Hilburn of the Los Angeles Times felt that the album's highlights leave "the occasional lapses and the forays into slower tempos" feeling "flat by comparison". NMEs Roger Morton conceded that it was "probably no more a disconsolate record than Introspective or Actually", but questioned its relative lack of a "defiant surge of rhythm".
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"Disciplinary power," Miller wrote, "constitutively mobilizes a tactic of tact: it is the policing power that never passes for such, but is either invisible or visible only under cover of other, nobler or simply blander intentionalities (to educate, to cure, to produce, to defend)." Miller's book thus countered critical celebrations of the novel as inherently emancipatory. (Indeed, The Novel and the Police exposed these celebrations as "perpetuating the [novel’s] ruse".) Against this "subversion hypothesis", Miller called for attention to the novel's ability effectively to produce subjects, its capacity to form "a subject habituated to psychic displacements, evacuations, reinvestments, in a social order whose totalizing power circulates all the more easily for being pulverized". In Anal Rope(1990), his definitive reading of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1948 film Rope, and in his next books, Bringing Out Roland Barthes (1992) and Place for Us: Essay on the Broadway Musical (1998), Miller turned to more explicitly gay-themed works, even while insisting on the importance of the implicit in mainstream culture’s representations and disavowals of homosexuality.
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Examples are the use of mercenaries to perform the work that the Culture does not want to get their hands dirty with, and even outright threats of invasion (the Culture has issued ultimatums to other civilisations before). Some commentators have also argued that those Special Circumstances agents tasked with civilising foreign cultures (and thus potentially also changing them into a blander, more Culture-like state) are also those most likely to regret these changes, with parallels drawn to real- world special forces trained to operate within the cultural mindsets of foreign nations. The events of Use of Weapons are an example of just how dirty Special Circumstances will play in order to get their way and the conspiracy at the heart of the plot of Excession demonstrates how at least some Minds are prepared to risk killing sentient beings when they conclude that these actions are beneficial for the long term good. Special Circumstances represents a very small fraction of Contact, which itself is only a small fraction of the entire Culture, making it comparable again to size and influence of modern intelligence agencies.
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