Word: bareness
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Floppy disks for personal computers generally come in bare-bones cardboard cases; the imagination all goes into the programming. For the Ability software package, though, Toronto's Spencer/Francey Group has designed a clever casing in black mat plastic that alludes to the injection-molding process itself: the shapes of computer keys and a disk stand in relief, as if actually slipped into the mold. Going to a decorative extreme, Sava Cvek Associates has designed a lamp that seems more like a sculpture than a functional object. Dauntingly tall (6 ft. 4 in.), their light is a lush, glowing monolith...
...rainy period, the landscape is verdant, but during the five to six months of the year that are rainless (early December to mid-May in Costa Rica), many trees lose their leaves. Unlike the temperate zone's deciduous hardwood forests, however, they do not become fully dormant. Instead, the bare trees flower and bear fruit, which nourishes a variety of mammals and insects. Centuries ago, such vegetation covered 60% of the forest regions of Latin America, India, Southeast Asia, Africa and northern Australia. On the west coast of Central America alone, 98% has been chopped down or burned. Says Janzen...
...sweet reality at the 55-acre Hollywood studios of venerable Paramount Pictures, a subsidiary of Gulf & Western. A year ago, the company that distributed one of the first Hollywood feature-length movies (The Squaw Man, 1914) was close to the ropes, its revenues sagging and its film larder practically bare. Today, in the words of Gordon Crawford, senior vice president of Capital Guardian Research, a Los Angeles investment-management firm, "they're having the greatest year of any company in the recent history of the movie business...
...take the few remaining kernels lying on the fields of collective farms. In one village, families gathered acorns from under the snow and baked them into a sort of bread. A party official complained, "Look at the parasites! They went digging for acorns in the snow with their bare hands -- they'll do anything to get out of working." Villages became ghost towns, with families lying dead in every house. Conquest reckons that the final death toll from the entire war against the peasants was 14.5 million souls...
There are no sets, and the production opens, a bit unpromisingly, on what seems to be a family gathering: 20 men and women standing in a semicircle on a bare stage. But, after the first number, one of the men begins to sing. Imagine a bagpipe full of gravel wailing into a nor'easter, and you have some idea of his doleful song and the others that punctuate the evening. "Ay! Ay! Let your bowels be torn from your body because you don't know how to love," goes one typical lyric...