Word: accordion
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Scientists have known for a while that it is the shifting of tectonic plates that produces earthquakes. What scientists should be grateful to learn is that the reason the plates shift is that somebody is playing the piano accordion. Tectonic plates are very sensitive: they cannot abide the sound of accordion playing, and when they hear all that caterwauling, they shift uncomfortably, jolting the Richter scale to A above high C. It is no coincidence that earthquakes occur wherever huge numbers of accordion players congregate. Many of them are said to be aswarm in eastern China, where earthquakes are common...
Spectators clapped and cheered from the sidelines, little kids held out water and orange slices, one strange woman wore rabbit ears and played the accordion for us. My race belongs in part to all of them that yelled at me to run harder when I was dogging it, that ordered me to run when I was in so much pain that it was all I could do to take another step...
...good deal of the beat comes from the state of Bahia. There, in the Brazilian equivalent of the American Deep South, African tribal dances are blended with European sounds to create the insistent samba; the afoxe, associated with the Afro-Roman Catholic Candomble religion; and the chugging, accordion-dominated forro, which blends African rhythms with Portuguese folk music. Says U.S. guitarist Arto Lindsay, co-producer with Peter Scherer of the latest album by an eminent Brazilian performer, Caetano Veloso: "In Bahia and the north you find the purest African rhythms, some of the most innovative in Brazil." Notes Byrne: "Bahia...
Severe penalties sometimes threaten the editor of the Mirror, a tabloid published every other week behind the rock walls and accordion-wire fences of the maximum-security Minnesota Correctional Facility at Stillwater. The punishment is likely to come not from the warden or the guards but from any of the approximately 1,200 convicted car thieves, drug dealers, armed robbers, kidnapers, rapists, child abusers and murderers who may take issue with his editorial policy...
...moment when the city of 290,000 was, without warning, shaken violently by a rumble from the earth. Concrete and stone snapped like brittle twigs, hospitals and schools crashed down on patients and children, and workers were entombed in factories. Within minutes the city was split apart like an accordion. Forty-five miles to the north, the town of Spitak, population 30,000, was virtually "erased from the face of the earth," in the words of a Soviet television commentator. Said a local news-agency editor: "Ninety-nine percent of the population is gone...