In that sense, the help-desk worker is like the radio talk-show host or the newspaper advice columnist, inviting familiarity between strangers who share problems and personal asides.

Anything that happened - board meetings, union negotiations, unkind personal asides, costume designers frantically sewing little wings onto tutus - was fair game for the cameras.

He also leavens his analysis with personal asides and ruminations that sketch in his own efforts to grapple with the issue of race.

They were collections of quotations, observations, clippings, proverbs, poems, personal asides and anything else that someone found worthy of saving for future reference or sharing with friends.

After he had quieted the room with a sharp rebuke from his gavel, the judge instructed Bosch to keep his answers on point and to refrain from personal asides.

He is 51 and balding, but boyish in blue jeans and tennis shoes, and he leavens his sociological theories with personal asides.

These insights, however, are camouflaged in a thicket of personal asides and precious verbiage.

He frequently employs a now-and-then strategy, offering up a series of seemingly incidental personal asides, which turn out to have a historical parallel or resonance.

One longs for more such personal asides.

Some see her occasionally irreverent cracks and personal asides as less a show of nerves than a mark of confidence, a willingness to let her humanity show.