Word: absurd
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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There are elements of absurdity in such a controversy, and yet it derives quite directly from a broader question that is not absurd at all: When does human life begin? At the moment of conception, say many conservatives, both religious and secular. The Rev. Donald McCarthy, of the Pope John XXIII Medical-Moral Research and Education Center in St. Louis, argued sweepingly before the congressional hearings that there is "no evidence of a threshold, a starting point other than fertilization itself, for the beginning of human nature." This is a standard argument against abortion, but McCarthy used it to endow...
Actually, unlike others who share this absurd Walter Mitty daydream, I had done something about it. A month before the Games I had gone to the Olympic Training Center under the shadow of Pikes Peak in Colorado Springs to be tested in the Sports Physiology laboratories there to see if by chance there was a particular Olympic event for which I was a perfect physical specimen to suit...
West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl last week dismissed the Soviet campaign as "completely absurd defamation." Officials in Bonn say the blasts from Moscow will in no way affect the Honecker visit. The Soviet attacks may reflect the Kremlin's desire, as a Soviet official put it to a West German diplomat in Moscow recently, "to treat the West Germans the same way we treat the Americans." But they also give voice to deep-rooted fears that Germany will one day be reunited and become hostile to the Soviet Union. Said a Western diplomat: "They are putting down a marker...
...then there will be a day when the light comes in on a bright, sharp slant-clarity an artist lives for. Even drunks, then, can see the mortar between the bricks-and the place appeals and no longer seems absurd. An absolutely azure sky set off by a single cloud looking as if it were shot up there from a pastry chefs icing gun, that kind of a day. And everywhere houses cling to the cliffsides like cockleburs. Jade plants, looking like so many butter beans on a stick, grow high and thick out here, form hedges, give privacy. (Back...
...Alas, there the exiles have adopted native customs with a vengeance. The women wear gold boots with green hearts and T shirts with breasts printed on them. The men buy calfskin jackets if they can afford them, checkered suits if they cannot. During their frequent alcoholic binges, they plot absurd schemes for a National Liberation Army of the Czechoslovak People that will overthrow their country's Communist tyrants...