Word: bafflement
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...Milne's classic, Piglet was left virtually speechless by his run-in with what he thought was the mysterious Heffalump. Now astronomers can share his bafflement as they grope for words to describe their own strange encounter. Off in the distant heavens, among a grouping of stars that the ancients called Cygnus (the Swan), they seem to have found a celestial version of a Heffalump. It is a cosmic beast of such enormous gravity that it appears to be tugging, stretching and, indeed, slowly gobbling up its giant companion, a massive star more than 20 times the size...
...people," Sadat says. In 1972 he decided to upbraid them with a bit of theater. He put on his Commander in Chiefs uniform, complete with medals and sashes, and summoned the chief Soviet adviser. "Who do you see sitting in front of you?" Sadat asked. When the Russian expressed bafflement, Sadat screamed at him: "I am Field Marshal Joseph Stalin, that's who! If those spare parts don't get here immediately, I am going to deal with you the way Stalin did." Shortly afterward, Sadat sent the Soviets to his own version of Siberia-back to Russia...
Nearly all the Red Army gangsters are products of middle-and upper-middle-class families. Many Germans share the bafflement that George Bernard Shaw is said to have expressed years ago about the English young: "They've got enough food, sexual freedom and indoor toilets. Why the deuce aren't they happy?" West German terrorists are especially difficult to fathom because ideologically they travel light, somewhat like the turn-of-the-century Russian anarchists called bezmo-tivniki (motiveless ones). Says Martin Greiffenhagen, a political scientist at the University of Stuttgart: "Behind the acts of terror stands neither revolutionary...
Between the Lines moves between the lives of its characters, shuttling from one comic vignette to the next--but this movement, like those lives, never seems to lead anywhere. Style is substance, but both are so fragmentary that the final effect, when the credits roll on the screen, is bafflement and frustration. Silver's flair is for the short, neatly-shaped segment. From these segments, the bits and pieces of humor and pathos that comprise the film, she is unable to forge any overarching dramatic unity...
...impression that his friend Mike Burton wrote it as a sort of tribute to anyone who's ever done what he wanted instead of what he was expected to do. The narrator is a cowboy who fled the city for a simpler, older way of life, to the bafflement of his friends. One of them writes him a letter...