Word: bamboos
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...rhythmical Trinidad (see Music), however, Harman took his ear directly to the source. From predawn, when a rooster, the only unmusical creature he heard on the island, awoke him, he roamed the carnival-crowded streets of Port-of-Spain to hear such exotic instruments as steel drums, bongos and bamboo tamboo. In a hidden grove of palms, he even heard a bootleg concert of the long-banned jungle drums. One night at Port-of-Spain's Little Carib Theater the island's wild and inexorable rhythms got to Harman. Like everybody else, he began to do the jump...
Skin drums were long banned by the British in order to suppress African tribal traditions, but Trinidad musicians discovered they could make a kind of music with tubes of bamboo. "Bamboo-tamboo" bands competed with each other, thunking large-bore tubes on the ground and whacking smaller sticks together in the air to create a rich polyrhythmic effect; onlookers, unable to resist the compelling beat, would pound anything that would make noise. But by the early '30s bamboo was on its way out-the police had found that the sticks were too likely to be used as weapons. Then...
Special cops were on duty to untie traffic snarls converging on a San Fernando Valley mansion near Hollywood. The Yuletide cynosure: a rooftop Santa Claus, made of bamboo, hammering away at a wrought-iron piano garnished with a twinkly candelabra, while loudspeakers blared hi-fi recordings of the schmalziest music on the far side of Bethlehem. Beamed the spectacle's beamish mastermind, Liberace: "I just love Christmas...
Next, his police moved on the 500-odd opium dens in South Viet Nam, and in closing them down, undertook a campaign to rehabilitate some 20,000 addicts. Thousands of confiscated bamboo pipes-kindled by stacks of pornographic literature -were burned in Saigon's central marketplace, and antivice dragon dancers whirled through the streets. Madame Paula turned up working in a pastry shop...
...showed up in an open Mercedes-Benz. At the intersection of two of Calcutta's big streets, the Russians waved their straw hats, and Khrushchev cried out in their own language: "Hindi Russi bhai bhai!" (Indians, Russians, brothers, brothers!). Instantly the crowd burst forward, shattering police lines and bamboo barricades to swarm over the car. Some clutched Bulganin's coat. Others seized Khrushchev's hands and arms. As the Indians piled their weight upon the Mercedes, it broke down. With police aid, the visitors pulled themselves clear of the clustering crowd and fought their...