Whichever franchise you're in, the servers and the Southwestern pizza steak sandwich are blandly pleasant in the same blandly pleasant way.
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There's some sluggish action, a little tension, a few clearly telegraphed jump scares, a bit of romance, a cute kid, and some blandly conceived wisecracks nestled into blandly conceived dialogue.
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It blandly says the rest comes from elsewhere in Africa.
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The feeds are uncontroversially nice, blandly attractive, and pleasingly symmetrical.
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Uncle Sean was as blandly ugly as a big toenail.
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Bowing to the same rule, most generals offer blandly stirring replies.
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Here's the thing: The "End Game" video is just blandly cool.
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"It was up to them to punish him," he blandly declared.
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He does it so relentlessly that it has become blandly familiar.
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Which isn't to say this show isn't blandly facetious and fluffy also.
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I have to reprimand," Trump said, before adding blandly, "How dare you.
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So I suppose it's good that Trump's UN speech was blandly positive.
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Many are visual non-sequiturs, blandly pleasant images which don't make sense.
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You'll either have found someone with similar tastes (and thus have the most blandly agreeable natter imaginable, so blandly pleasant that you'll start fantasizing about defenestration) or someone who likes different music to you and is thus utterly alien.
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This year, however, he was successful on a blandly evil right-wing platform.
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Again, the newly dead inhabitants will be blandly "bad," rather than genuinely evil.
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Most of the time, Slack is described blandly as a workplace communication tool.
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Commentary around the morning's military parade was either blandly positive or strictly apolitical.
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The other characters always look blandly surprised at the news of Callie's money.
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"Heavy" is blandly suggestive of burdens stoically borne rather than horrors unwillingly endured.
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But her book was questing and inquisitive while Mr. Lubow's hums blandly along.
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At the same time, the movie's dialogue can be earnest and blandly functional.
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But the book it's based on is more relevant to our blandly hateful present.
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But Rock, who of course attracts Cyrano, too, is blandly uninteresting beyond his musculature.
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Instead, he came to stand for truth, justice and a blandly righteous American way.
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Lacking that bite, the film just sort of coasts blandly over the finish line.
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Blandly saying that clients should follow the principle of "caveat emptor" is not good enough.
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Confirmation hearings are meant to help one answer such questions, not blandly smooth them over.
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The minutes blandly deny that the Fed's moves led to increased long-term interest rates.
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His dialog is often blandly functional, too easily taken over by expositional speeches and exchanges.
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" This is a word usually rendered blandly as "fellowship" or "sharing" or (slightly better) "communion.
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Does she say that you should only keep books that make you blandly, flatly happy?
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Regardless, Sainsbury's tried to blandly assure the customers that it wasn't one of its employees, probably.
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The invention and imagination of the thirties slowed to a set of stereotyped, blandly biomorphic solutions.
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It is a solo piece in which her character, a former schoolteacher blandly known as Mrs.
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"Dallas & Robo" is more blandly contemporary and, through two episodes available for review, less well defined.
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"We almost got run over by horses," one partygoer said blandly, drifting off toward the gin.
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If "Created Equal" is trying to promote the conservative cause, it does so gently, and blandly.
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Everyone's yelling and most of the bits of humor along the way are too blandly inserted.
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The industrial carpeting is red and frayed, the walls beige and prefab, the atmosphere blandly oppressive.
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Stanley is a study in unspecified damage, and an unspoken anger courses beneath his blandly bespectacled visage.
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A blandly villainous emissary from the government descends, forcing the ensemble to adapt Soviet-style socialist realism.
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Not everyone in that clan is as regal as Eleanor or as blandly agreeable as her son.
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"Tending to Eligia was tolerable because we both liked silence," he blandly announces a few months in.
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Here, that unclassifiable quality has been blunted and contained, and Salander made into another blandly tough chick.
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These are the blandly vicious lies that companies proffer when they want to take something away from you.
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In 2017, the blandly named Treasury Offset Program seized $2.8 billion from student borrowers who were in default.
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Even when Mr Trump darkly threatened to jail her if elected, she blandly directed viewers to her website.
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Like Leeloo, Laureline — Valerian's ass-kicking, wisecracking counterpart — is a more intriguing character than her blandly heroic partner.
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Toutiao denied it was snooping but conceded, blandly, that the story revealed a growing public "awareness of privacy".
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Instead, various news outlets blandly regurgitated Sabato's interview quotes without any follow-up reporting or impassioned op-eds.
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Kauniainen's blandly named Adult Education Center, a tall building on the edge of town, did not sound promising.
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There was something warped about the details—would Heaven really be so mall-like, so blandly Whole Foods?
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The man's wife and adult children, who were his caretakers, suggested blandly that he died of natural causes.
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With its blandly abstract set and kitschy L.E.D. lighting, the staging did little to flesh out Andersen's world.
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What was left was blandly utilitarian: a podium, a pair of speakers, a cracked and dusty concrete floor.
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This is particularly evident in the radio dramas, which are blandly "disturbing" twists on wholesome children's shows and sitcoms.
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But The End of Animal Farming proceeds blandly through its points like a slide deck at a pitch meeting.
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People are overwhelmed by options; they don't want to see 10,000 different sofas, or 40,000 different blandly tasteful prints.
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Maybe the real apocalypse will come in the form of death by a thousand blandly conceived, loud, 'splodey sequels.
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The blandly emotive choreography, seen in brief flashes is not worthy of an apprentice, much less a prima ballerina.
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The decor was blandly elegant, which is to say it mostly beige marble with floral displays on every surface.
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At one end of the spectrum, Ms. Peck has sometimes been too blandly sweet, too synthetic to have depth.
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Joel is a blandly nice guy who was apparently blindsided by his role in a Silicon Valley fraud scheme.
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Through six episodes it's blandly mediocre, though it starts to perk up a little in Episodes 5 and 6.
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Which is to say that the most normal, blandly partisan parts of Trump's agenda are also among the least popular.
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For six hundred pages, the novel follows Carisdall as he travels around the island, wondering blandly at Icaria's wondrous wonders.
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The few topics that received high scores from both parties tended to be blandly unobjectionable, such as nurses and farmers.
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As both symptom and cause of this blandly ubiquitous urbanism, we have in part the architect Bjarke Ingels to thank.
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The next NASA rover headed to Mars, up to now blandly referred to as Mars 2020, has been named Perseverance.
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Is it the title track, whose blandly suburban mall keyboards accompany a rant against information overload and the media-literate?
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Judas, actually, is not a giant role, but it is a crucial one, too blandly played here by Gabriel Furman.
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The setting was a blandly furnished room in the once storied New Yorker Hotel on the edge of Hell's Kitchen.
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Meredith's love interest could have been any blandly handsome man, the faceless guy of Sally's dreams in When Harry Met Sally.
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Ben Larson (Sean Teale) is purposely flavorless and blandly handsome with a forgettable name and a vague career at Spiga Biotech.
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The camera stops panning wildly and becomes steady, even calm: focusing now on the blandly handsome hiker, map in his hand.
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The main story suffers most from this problem: Outside of their arias, Orpheus and Eurydice are blandly written and thus performed.
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Lopez captures an era in which marriage equality has been secured while gay signifiers have been blandly absorbed by the mainstream.
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Instead, those who champion entomophagy are trying to smuggle bugs past our defenses, often ground into a blandly inoffensive, uniform powder.
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His lush paintings make you feel Romanticism in your guts, offering an antidote to some of today's more bloodless, blandly cerebral art.
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A decade ago, Bratislava's cafe scene was unremarkable: Hidden in shopping malls, coffee shops served utilitarian cups of blandly brewed hot water.
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Any time you order this item, you've pretty much resigned yourself to a race against a melting pile of blandly flavored ice.
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A live-wire performer, she has a sly, teasing sensibility that has always been far too off-kilter to be blandly relatable.
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As Hollywood goes blandly global, Hell or High Water offers a refreshingly local, regionally specific story that nevertheless reveals an entire world.
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Very few of them look directly at the camera, instead peering truculently at the ground or blandly off into the middle distance.
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Would traditional studios, with their proclivity for blandly appealing blockbuster fare, even have the guts to gamble on a film like Okja?
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Therein lies an honesty and earnestness that undermines the typical critical assessment that blandly describe Nut as humorous exercises of faux-naïveté.
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General Magic features a lot of successful tech icons reminiscing about their younger days, a format that's ripe for blandly self-congratulatory mythmaking.
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In social situations, prosopagnosics often smiled blandly and behaved as if they had previously encountered everyone they met, rather than risk offending acquaintances.
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Contrary to what some might assume, vegan sandwiches aren't all just comprised of plain veggie fillers stuffed blandly between bread with no protein punchline.
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Thus, the Oscars mostly followed the form of Kimmel, who was blandly pleasant and inoffensive, making the obvious Trump jokes—he Tweets too much!
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The action unfolds in Jaime and Brittany's comfortable living room (the set is by Caite Hevner Kemp), whose blandly tasteful furniture suggests thoughtless conformity.
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When his blandly written book " Looking Backward " appeared, in 1888, it created a now puzzling craze both in his native America and in England.
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In that great way that Chinese hole-in-the-wall food so often does, its blandly beige appearance belies its impressive seasoning and taste.
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There's something truly wonderful about referring to a procedure as specific as a bilateral mastectomy with a term as blandly ominous as top surgery.
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But its persistent badness was so blandly executed that I walked out and entirely forgot the movie until someone reminded me of it recently.
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Most notably, his stories open with comments so blandly informational, so plain and unnoticeable, that they arouse no expectation and appear to promise little.
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Everyone he meets has the same voice and the same blandly incomplete face—except an ingenuous rep named Lisa, whom he drunkenly falls for.
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Mr. Stevens, blandly handsome as a human prince, is a splendid monster, especially when the diffidence and charm start to peek through the rage.
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Riepenhoff's own experimental photograms at times resemble Atkins's blandly majestic records of seaweed, though hers were made in the service of science rather than art.
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Peer inside a 300-qubit quantum computer, and essentially all you will see is 300 classical bits — zeros and ones — smiling blandly up at you.
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Instead, Transformed is divided into blandly broad thematic sections: The Divine Body; The Regal Body; The Transcendent Body; The Alluring Body; and The Resplendent Body.
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As zoos sought to improve the health of their resident apes, the enclosures often assumed a blandly sterile configuration, devoid of risky foliage or toys.
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" He also noted blandly that the U.S. "is deeply committed to helping the Government of Iraq rebuild; including helping Iraqis preserve their cultural and religious diversity.
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Exploring taboo themes and subverting socialist realist aesthetics, the works in this exhibition depicted the working class in blandly non-heroic, foolish, weak, even drunken styles.
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Others saw the document as blandly grandiose, showcasing Zuckerberg's tendency to suggest that the answer to nearly any problem is for people to use Facebook more.
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The Supra was, for past generations, the "halo car" for a brand that had built a reputation for otherwise producing reliable, if blandly plain-vanilla products.
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Ms Dlamini-Zuma has said little about her plans beyond blandly indicating that she would never refuse a request from the ANC to serve the party.
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The CGI alien invaders in The Avengers are so blandly drawn that it's difficult to even remember what they look like five minutes after they're offscreen.
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He also makes a few notable additions, including a clueless rookie sidekick (Scott Eastwood, blandly tolerating jokes at his expense) and convicted criminal Deckard Shaw (Statham).
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IF SAUDI ARAMCO is a state within a state in Saudi Arabia, then the blandly named Oil Supply Planning and Scheduling (OSPAS) is its deep state.
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Blandly brown in color and retaining none of the flash typical of other concept vehicles, the Moia EV probably flew under the radar for most people.
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And despite its relative dominance in the information space, Google's smart speaker, blandly named "Home," has struggled to take a bite out of Amazon's market share.
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It seems to be imitating the journey of its protagonist, Paul Safranek (Matt Damon), who is a blandly friendly fellow on the road to self-discovery.
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Its pieces zoom through the air like candy-colored shrapnel, whizzing by before the memory can tag them and making the blandly familiar sound enticingly exotic.
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More typically of her work, Lavinia's "A Lady of the Ruini Family" (1593) shows an auburn-haired noblewoman smiling blandly as she strokes her lap dog.
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Finally, a contender for "real" Chinese—spicy Sichuanese, rather than the blandly sweet Chinese-American takeout fare of places like Shun Lee and Ollie's Noodle Shop.
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Notorious Soviet spy Kim Philby served as the Middle East correspondent for a time, where he turned in blandly anti-communist articles to maintain his cover.
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In particular, progressives and suburban swing voters, all vital to the Liberal coalition in 2015, lacked strong impressions of Scheer, a barely known, blandly inoffensive rival.
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The portrait of Hillary is tart and unflattering, with shifty eyes and a sardonic half-smile, while Bernie gazes impassively, if not blandly, toward the horizon.
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The trauma of the dressing-room mirror greatly benefited the Health Spa, as it was blandly named, which saw as many as 400 clients a day.
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While the pieces on display are beautiful, The Met's Jewelry: The Body Transformed exhibition is lacking in curatorial vision, dividing the objects into blandly-broad thematic sections.
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In a sea of blandly titled raunchfests — Neighbors, Sisters, Grown-Ups, Spy — The Boss still manages to stand out as the most generic title of them all.
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Like his blandly conventional appearance, his wide-ranging allusions to European literature upended the idea that Brazil was a place of mystical forests or man-eating serpents.
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The play within the novel has the blandly lurid plot of a certain period of children's literature: Mister Monkey is an orphan, his parents killed by poachers.
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Manhatta isn't the first restaurant to update veal blanquette with meat that's roasted rather than stewed, but the sauce is so blandly milky that it's hardly there.
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The lobster is plump and sweetly fresh, but I detect only a whisper of ginger; the dumpling, thicker than I remember it, proves rich but blandly so.
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It's not so fine if you're trying to play a California surfer or a car dealer in Michigan or nearly anyone else, especially someone blandly all-American.
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Real egalitarianism is not just about declaring your city to be a "sanctuary" and blandly committing to staying true to liberal values, as our mayor has done.
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But it has more heart than almost any other video game, and I'll take that over the countless blandly competent zombie shooters that come out every year.
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The film shows two rats being electrocuted on a wire cage, while one man blandly pronounces the benefits of physical punishment, and the surprising violence that results.
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Dion would not blandly jog around cross screens for all the money and titles in the world if it meant he would have to give up this moment.
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It's a familiar concern for Ms. Granik, who's drawn to American outsiders — intentional and unintentional exiles alike — living in what are often blandly called poor and marginalized communities.
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"His stories open with comments so blandly informational, so plain and unnoticeable, that they arouse no expectation and appear to promise little," Cynthia Ozick writes in her review.
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Ultimately, Democrats on Thursday settled on a resolution condemning anti-Semitism, anti-Muslim discrimination, and "bigotry against minorities," a blandly inoffensive document that didn't seem to satisfy anyone.
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" They act more like communities or publics than like audiences, focused on their connections to one another and the group rather than to what is so blandly called "content.
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It turned out that the blandly named conference I'd been invited to—something about digital markets—was actually a giant collective hand-wringing about the state of German politics.
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That's what pushes people into clothing devised to further provoke and agitate, to be highly visible rather than blandly anonymous, the power of "otherness" as a tool of protest.
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What emerged was a kind of archaeological survey of late-1970s German interior decoration — ornaments, pot plants, beds, tables, fireplaces, all the more fascinating for being so blandly unremarkable.
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To Foster's way of thinking, the people in those houses, watching "EastEnders" over their blandly globalized dinners of pizza, pad thai, and aloo gobi, were living nowhere in particular.
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The same officials boast of open markets but, when Western governments raise specific cases of brutal treatment of foreign firms, blandly reply that they cannot get involved in commercial disputes.
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Last Saturday — 12 days ago now — I shared a cringeworthy video on Facebook: a six-minute clip of a twentysomething white woman showing off her small, blandly decorated Brooklyn apartment.
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As Swift transitioned from tween country princess to full-fledged, mainstream pop queen, she made her narrative about the kind of blandly universal women's empowerment that nobody could disagree with.
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On this first stop, though, the map probably should have indicated that the blandly named Mississippi River Visitor Center Lock and Dam 21100 was within a heavily guarded military base.
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Still, all of Guardians 2's storylines are better connected to one another than the stories in the first film, which awkwardly nestled emotional revelations within blandly staged action sequences.
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The movie is divided into drifty sections and opens with 45 minutes of young women on the beach who twerk in the water; rub sunscreen on one another; yammer blandly.
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That's the blandly sweet message of the Hindi movie "Chhichhore," which strains to be an inspirational comedy tear-jerker (Bollywood-wise, a reasonable genre) but mostly seems programmatic and timid.
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The announcement, which came on a Friday afternoon in a blandly titled email, was the final step in Mr. Obama's efforts to transform the relationship with a once reclusive government.
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" Breitbart, the right-wing website that embraced Mr. Trump during the election campaign, was, perhaps surprisingly, the most subdued, going with the blandly factual "The Inauguration of President Donald Trump.
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He took the truck through Herndon Homes, before they were knocked down, and rolled daily among the new apartments — clean, brick, rectilinear, blandly handsome — where Techwood Homes used to be.
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In nearby Jiu village, home to a century-old mosque, Wang Yisehakai, the ahong or imam, blandly praised General Bai as a pious man who prayed in the heat of battle.
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They have in Christy Altomare a near-perfect heroine whose only flaw is her flawlessness; as Anstasia, she seems too blandly resilient for anything more complex than a cartoon character's reinvention.
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We also get Topher Grace as David Duke (then, as now, the holy father of the K.K.K.), in a performance so blandly creepy that one feels half guilty for enjoying it.
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But new materials, substances and surfaces develop taste; it seems quixotic to willfully disregard their aptness and usefulness and charm, determining instead on an austerity, which, once achieved, is blandly static.
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The architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable, writing in The Times, said she liked his version of the World Trade Center better than the "blandly undistinguished 110 stories" of the real thing.
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When asked by reporters clustered on the blacktop outside the West Wing if Mr. Trump had command of the details of the negotiations, Mr. McConnell ignored the question and smiled blandly.
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There are scruffier models where the cars have been blandly renovated but the antique controls remain, and imperfectly maintained ones that shudder and jerk as the elevator man flips the lever.
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It's a world where Robert Redford has been president for nearly 30 years and instituted the sort of blandly neoliberal stopgap measures you'd expect a well-meaning rich white liberal to institute.
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Julianne Hough was a blandly pretty presence as Sandy -- imported from Utah this time instead of Australia -- and as Danny, Aaron Tveit could have used a little of that old Travolta swagger.
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Now, with a lawyer's blandly worded press statement on Tuesday morning, the love story of Angelina Jolie Pitt and Brad Pitt, who were married in 2014, has come to an unhappy end.
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Now, with a lawyer's blandly worded press statement on Tuesday morning, the love story of Angelina Jolie Pitt and Brad Pitt, who were married in 2000, has come to an unhappy end.
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Among those are the New York setting, a potential wonderland of glamour, filth and imagination that is rendered as blandly as if the movie had been shot on a back-lot set.
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" The EFCA is a nonprofit corporation formed in Delaware that describes itself blandly as a "national advocacy organization that seeks to promote public awareness of the benefits of solar and alternative energy.
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Nonetheless, the sprawling cast of characters in this populous drama, blandly directed by Doug Hughes, registers as so many integers, waiting to be clicked into prearranged places in a socio-economic equation.
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It rushes through Mr. Blahnik's biography, dwelling on pop-culture moments and blandly ecstatic celebrity testimonials (not counting the uproarious André Leon Talley, who insists Mr. Blahnik is "up there with Baudelaire").
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" Donvan and Zucker take a generally disengaged position on this matter, blandly approving the acknowledgment of "the dignity of individuals who are different by virtue of fitting the label in some way.
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Matt Damon and Kristen Wiig star as Paul and Audrey Safranek, a blandly beaming couple who come to the idea of miniaturizing themselves when they realize they can't afford the lifestyle they want.
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Shortly after Gavin and Stacey—the sitcom that made Corden the blandly unappealing prospect he is today—James and his co-star Mathew Horne were seen as the hottest property in British comedy.
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There was little sense of this blandly brooding, affectlessly luminous score shifting as the libretto did, leaving the words — only a handful of which were audible, with murky amplification partly to blame — adrift.
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The blandly named initiative is intended to give the victims more input in a speeded-up relief effort—and, the victims of genocide thought, more direct influence on how the resulting money was awarded.
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Muscle-bound and blandly handsome, White absolutely looks the part of the lacrosse-playing lummox galumphing around a college campus (one character later refers to his type as "basic white boys with pink dicks").
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Like Voltage's millions of other customers worldwide, I quickly came to find the virtual experience of blandly flirting with a variety of assorted hunks, all of whom are inexplicably obsessed with me, very absorbing.
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At first glance, a lot of it feels blandly quasi-Minimalist, an impression reinforced by Ms. Raza's stated premise that the exercise of logic, as embodied in geometry, is meant to bind the work.
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They attempted to counter this move by positioning Ossoff as blandly as possible — just a kind of nice guy who doesn't like Donald Trump — and dissociating him from any hard-edged ideas or themes.
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Company filings and court records reveal a tangled web of holding companies within blandly named holding companies, adding up to a multimillion-dollar rehab business, all tied together by an LLC called Treatment Management Company.
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Or at least we should all hope it is, because if his blandly apolitical 50-state tour has taught us anything, it's that the man is fundamentally incapable of taking any kind of meaningful stand.
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Reigns, a blandly good-looking guy with a familial pedigree in the business—he's the Rock's cousin, if you somehow hadn't heard—was chosen this time last year, and the push hasn't let up since.
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Slipping into fluent Globalese, the blandly uplifting argot used at gatherings of world leaders, billionaires and CEOs, Mr Xi beamed that it was natural to share the fruits of innovation "in our interconnected global village".
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And because they no longer having to rely on human technology or ingenuity, they default to sub-"Star Wars" dogfights and laser-gun shoot-outs showcasing a crowd of blandly good-looking "Hunger Games" types.
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Instead, it's let a rotation of female hosts slip on a straight blonde wig and smile blandly into the camera, the sleeker, more polished member of the Trump family to Alec Baldwin's sputtering, pouting Donald.
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The winking allusions to Homer, and the mania to fulfill certain midcentury entertainment expectations, ensure that pressing matters of love and fidelity, pride and temptation, are, except in those arias, too blandly packaged to sting.
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But while the other men tried to keep their questions and conversations with the Luke-Ness Monster to a minimum ("You excited about your date?" someone asked blandly), Garrett wasn't afraid to threaten Luke more explicitly.
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As Elizabeth de Burgh, Robert the Bruce's (Chris Pine) wife in Outlaw King, she injected poise, dignity and boldness to a character who might have blandly, lovingly just supported her husband in any other medieval biopic.
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The result, for the most part, is a blandly conventional $100 million superhero origin movie that beefs up the production values but strips the franchise of the quirks that made it appealing in the first place.
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It has promised to build a wall to keep out migrants and backs a referendum on restoring maximum punishment, not excluding the death penalty, for drug dealers and pedophiles, but its style is more blandly managerial.
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Given the fact that Ryan's words are delivered so blandly you can barely register them as speech, it could make for great background noise, something to put on while you work, or fall sleep, or meditate.
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Blandly titled "Potential Policy Proposals for Regulation of Social Media and Technology Firms," the document actually represented one of the most serious attempts to outline a regulation regime for tech ever to come off Capitol Hill.
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If I have to watch another white person blandly chirp through a cover of a 90s R&B song, painfully body-rolling throughout, I will toss myself into the ocean and offer my soul to Poseidon.
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Credit...Amani Willett for The New York Times In the fall of 22009, Ken Liu received an intriguing offer from a Chinese company with a blandly bureaucratic name: China Educational Publications Import and Export Corporation, Ltd.
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Nor did it have anything to do with what's happened to the tamago, which used to be a kind of whipped custard with a haunting savory finish and is now more like a blandly sweet yellow spongecake.
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With no common criteria by which to judge moral action we'd all become blandly nonjudgmental — sort of chill, pluralistic versions of Snoop Dogg: You do you and I'll do me and we'll all be cool about it.
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Until recently, its next-door neighbor was the iconic strip-joint-for-her, the Hardbodies Ladies Club, but now it's been tidied up and blandly relaunched as an art space and dance floor friendlier to families than bachelorettes.
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It's not about relationships, it doesn't have a "social theme" like "Beat It" (a song about how gang violence is bad) and it's preceded by "The Girl Is Mine," maybe the most blandly saccharine entry in Jackson's discography.
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Odell investigated the origins of a blandly stylish watch that was being offered for free (plus shipping) on Instagram, and found a mirrored fun house of digital storefronts that looked as though they had been generated by algorithm.
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While I look and was raised blandly white, the confusing phantom limb of my First Nations heritage contributed far more to my values and ethics than the oodles of French Canadian genes that make up the rest of me.
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I admire both impulses, though I think what's most important is to have an actual opinion rather than, I don't know, blandly letting the next four years go by while doing one's own thing inside the island of California.
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Those blandly named funds and foundations and grants and prizes all gesture directly to the source of the corporation's unimaginable wealth — a problem's cause and its effect, all wrapped up in a package of good vibes and glossy marketing.
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Rather than renounce the neutering of the Senate, Renzi said this week he was happy to review the Italicum and his ruling coalition presented a blandly worded motion to parliament on Wednesday saying it was ready to discuss modifications.
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The New York Times captured the dynamic succinctly: When asked by reporters clustered on the blacktop outside the West Wing if Mr. Trump had command of the details of the negotiations, Mr. McConnell ignored the question and smiled blandly.
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The talking points for KPRF campaigners, which in the past have been so blandly anodyne as to be almost parodies, confining themselves to softball issues such as more support for pensioners and war veterans, are much more hard-hitting this time.
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That's right, folks, other areas of the world have blandly handsome and ridiculously fit white people with capped teeth and a whacked out sense of boundaries that will compete against dozens of strangers to get married to someone they've never met.
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Considering that Disney has proved so capable at turning beloved cultural properties into blandly effective hit-producing machines, there are a handful of reasons to be at least cautiously anticipatory about what it might do with all of its new toys.
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For some experiences you just have to wait — and the exhibitions of Yayoi Kusama, the 90-year-old Japanese mastermind of obsessively dotted paintings, hallucinatory pumpkins and sometimes blandly decorative installations, have become the art world's equivalent of Star Wars premieres.
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Wells Fargo's 2015 annual report, issued in February, blandly describes other lawsuits and investigations involving the bank, including mortgage issues related to the financial crisis, and notes that it had set aside approximately $20103 billion to cover the cost of litigation.
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With many prime-age workers still available to be hired — what economists and policy makers at the Federal Reserve blandly term "labor market slack" — the current pace of hiring should be able to continue with little threat of overheating the economy.
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I see obsessively smooth, stain-free bedspreads, pert little bean bag chairs, fussy accent rugs, blandly mollifying posters, bookshelves arranged by color, bathroom selfies in which all evidence of acne and periods and military-caliber deodorant has been stashed meticulously away.
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That super PAC, blandly titled "Red and Gold," was able to conceal its donors -- and thus its links to national Democrats -- and avoid disclosure until after the election with a tactic increasingly used by other Democratic super PACs this cycle.
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The girls (and a sweet, lone boy, Luke) execute interpretive dances choreographed by their blandly fascistic Dance Teacher Pat, but as the play unfolds, their transforming bodies unlock new forms of self-expression, and the locker room becomes their stage.
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People who think the money tech spends can buy protection from the political system misunderstand their dynamic: The transfers of money referred to blandly as "campaign finance" are equal parts bribery and extortion, and the system works best when the target is scared.
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It's a very sweet moment among the family, and rather an awkward one for Nick, who blandly smiles and rests a hand on Raven's knee, trying his hardest to pretend there is any reason a stranger should reasonably be there for this.
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Such is the pace of what is blandly labelled "global change" that there are only a handful of comparable examples in Earth's history, the most recent being the asteroid impact that ended the reign of the dinosaurs, sixty-six million years ago.
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WASHINGTON — By the time American negotiators wrapped up high-level talks with a visiting Chinese delegation last week, President Trump's ambitions for a multibillion-dollar trade agreement had, for the time being, shriveled into a blandly worded communiqué without any dollar figures.
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It's fine for Magic Leap to hold off on revealing hardware, but I wish the talented team behind it didn't keep talking about their work in the most blandly inspirational manner possible, doing their best to avoid acknowledging the larger field they're working in.
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What she should really do was start thinking as blandly as possible before bad things happened, as soon as she started feeling cranky or evil, and make her life totally boring so that whoever watched it would fast-forward and maybe miss the bad stuff.
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On the Buda side of the Danube River, the former royal palace squats grandly atop Castle Hill, blandly remade by the Communists after the destruction of World War II into the current home of the National Gallery of Art and the city's history museum.
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They have a big presence at the GDC every year, where they do a lot of panels with appeals to education, raising awareness, and such, but there's invariably something blandly controversial, like casually equating governments regulating loot boxes with mass Chinese censorship of games.
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The British Foreign Secretary, Boris Johnson, was criticized for responding too blandly to the situation, but on Monday he also called for freedom of expression and the right to demonstrate peacefully to be respected, and said that the issues raised by the protesters were legitimate.
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In the show's version of reality, a blandly pleasant, morally weak humanity has allowed the likes of Bob torun amok, while a few ancient mythological beings — like The Giant, and The Arm — try to steer our noblest remaining champions to protect order and innocence.
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A graduate of Canadian Idol's fifth season, she broke through with "Call Me Maybe," a song whose processed enthusiasm, circular synth stabs, and ringtone-worthy chorus were so blandly, gleefully, maddeningly ubiquitous during the summer of 2012 that she never scored another hit again.
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There's no café, not really anywhere to sit and read, nothing special about the fixtures, a very boring magazine selection and a collection of books that feels blandly standard — not the sense of opinionated curation you'd find at a boutique like Brooklyn's new Books Are Magic.
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Eventually I stopped busking in front of Notre-Dame and sought out trouble in other parts of Paris, the Île de la Cité becoming in my mind a blandly familiar, anodyne quarter that I'd traverse when traveling from Left Bank to Right Bank or vice versa.
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He had the right to do with them as he wished, and what he did was deeply damaging, not just in airing Hardwick's intimate communication but in editing it — editing her — into a character to suit his story, all the while blandly insisting she was the heroine.
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Other people, Williams writes, will try to comfort her, "but it is important that this is seen as something that should need to be done, and indeed some doubt would be felt about a driver who too blandly or readily moved to that position" of comfort.
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And thanks be to the American Society of Pediatrics, but just blandly telling women that it's best to breastfeed for a year completely ignores the realities of being a working, struggling, and exhausted mother trapped in a culture that venerates mothers but does shit all to help us.
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In the film, set in 2045, Wade Watts (a young man played by the agreeably bland, blandly agreeable Tye Sheridan) lives in "the stacks," a vertical pile of trailers where the poorer residents of Columbus, Ohio (Oklahoma City in the book), cling to hope, dignity and their VR gloves.
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CenterHotel Thingholt The hotel, located just off Reykjavik's main thoroughfare, Laugavegur, is a refreshing departure from the usual Icelandic fare of blandly Scandinavian interiors: Here, Fendi chairs and plush Poliform sofas sit on a floor of black ostrich leather, while a cocoon-like pendant hangs from the ceiling.
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A serviceable but not stylish filmmaker, Adler shoots office spaces and restaurants in a blandly shadowy style redolent of peak TV. The momentum keeps up, though, until the homestretch recasts the proceedings as a character study, a choice that mostly plays like an excuse to avoid resolving the plot.
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Over the past decade, he has earned prestigious appointments — residencies at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, a close association with the San Francisco Symphony — on the strength of blandly affable forced marriages of rave-style electronic beats and Bernstein-style orchestral lushness.
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These updates make the restaurant feel subtly refreshed, which I imagine will go a long way for the types of diners who've been keeping the place afloat; on a blandly corporate block of Midtown East, Aquavit seems to attract mostly suits and well-to-do middle-aged tourists.
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A serviceable but not stylish filmmaker, Adler shoots office spaces and restaurants in a blandly shadowy style redolent of peak TV. The momentum keeps up, though, until the homestretch recasts the proceedings as a character study, a choice that mostly plays like an excuse to avoid resolving the plot.
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The president appoints a blandly pro-business majority to the FCC, the Senate confirms them, and then they quietly set about regulating the industry in a manner that's favorable to unpopular broadband monopolists such as Verizon and Comcast (whose NBC Universal subsidiary is one of several investors in Vox's parent company).
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The plain fact is that the noisy group that goes by the blandly inane moniker of the Freedom Caucus was never on the team to begin with — neither Team GOP, nor Team Trump — and it's becoming more and more apparent that it's a fool's errand to get caucus members to join.
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The rule, with the blandly mellifluous title "Financial Instruments–Overall: Recognition and Measurement of Financial Assets and Financial Liabilities," or Accounting Standards Update 21.8-23, will change the way companies, both big and small, account for their equity investments in other companies, specifically for those stakes smaller than 22 percent.
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And yet in keeping with the Trump-era rule stipulating that ''the enemy of the enemy of the people is my friend,'' the mockery directed at this blandly ubiquitous greenroom denizen — just the kind of Washington political hack Trump ran against — propelled him to a golden status with ''the base.
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Before "Git Gone," Laura — who died in a car crash the same day that Shadow Moon was released from prison — wasn't much more than a soothing voice on the distant end of a prison telephone, a symbol of the life Shadow lost, a blandly smiling angel flitting around the edges of his memory.
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Instead, global power brokers like French President Emmanuel Macron, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and German Chancellor Angela Merkel strode out one-by-one on to the stage of the U.N. General Assembly in New York and for the most part riffed on the same blandly inoffensive principles: Climate change is definitely happening.
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Young designers are looking to an old-fashioned idea of conservative dress, but rather than blandly accepting it as it is, they're trying to refashion it to make it a testament to modern times and social mores, expressive of the ideals of contemporary society, rather than stuck in the staid conventions of the past.
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While this is all useful and sensible data, in actuality, this is the guy who sat blankly in a frozen courtyard for weeks on end, staring blandly through his sister Sansa when she hugs him hello after not seeing him for years and barely talking to people except to deliver cryptic information in a creepy monotone.
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When she writes that Landon's "Flowers of Loveliness" is "not blandly shallow but deeply shallow", or that what might first be read as "mawkishness" is really a "channel" for "suppressed personal rage", or that her "naive sentimentalism" reveals "bitter and cynical depths when voiced", the modern reader returns to the poems, reads them aloud and concludes: shallow, mawkish, sentimental.
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He would continue to be dismissive about how he had to write bland pop music in order to get ahead, inadvertently feeding into the media's narrative about him as a blandly pretty pop idol who wasn't a "real" musician — a narrative that went hand in hand with the insinuations that neither was he a "real" man.
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I was unsure of it, because it's part of a restaurant chain, founded in Malaysia more than a decade ago, with more than a hundred outlets around the Pacific Rim; because a friend in Singapore likened it to a fast-food joint; because the Flushing outpost, opened last year, is on the second floor of a blandly modern mall.
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Some images have been modified less by Heinecken's intervention than by the passage of time: the image of Lani Guinier, who features prominently in one revised magazine, is less iconic today than it once was, and a smiling Bill Cosby in an old Kodak advertisement will never again signify blandly respectable domesticity, as it once did.
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Bland and blandly self-aware, still sulking over his parents' divorce and his mother's death, Jeffrey casts up what arguments he can against the impending frigid disconnection, but it soon grows clear that his author's will is closer to those who construct and justify large, forbidding, rigorous, complex structures than to those who seek to exit them or offer alternatives.
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Their eager precision, their oooohs and ahhhhs and sighs and hums, the vanilla smoothness of their voices, as polished and feel-good as Broadway vocals (minus the enunciation) — are all throwbacks to Glee and High School Musical, whose late-'00s success proved, if only for a fleeting moment, that a diverse troupe of show choir kids could get revenge on their high school tormentors by finally becoming cool and taking over the world — which they accomplish by flattening classic pop songs into blandly idealized replicas.
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