Word: bafflements
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...from the pricing regulations drawn up by the Council on Wage and Price Stability (COWPS) to enforce Jimmy Carter's Stage II guidelines. The rules were supposed to put some muscle into the White House's campaign against inflation, but they have become a source of bafflement for lawyers, accountants and businessmen everywhere...
...outrageous extremes. Handkerchiefs is a wet dream gone beautifully berserk. The tone is set by the opening scene, in which Depardieu presents Dewaere, a total stranger, as a "gift" to his wife Solange. She remains indifferent to the men's shenanigans, and the men succumb to complete bafflement. They sit by Solange's bedside, aimlessly but poetically speculating about the mysteries that lie within her heart and mind. Only when the heroine falls for a 13-year-old prodigy (Riton) does she finally arouse from her stupor. The boy becomes, by turns, Solange's brother, son, lover...
...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...