Word: barrens
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...shelf with Rabelais and Swift. Woody Allen's The Kugelmass Episode stands as a classic. In it, a professor of humanities is propelled backward in time to the arms of Madame Bovary and the pages of a remedial Spanish textbook: "He was running for his life over a barren, rocky terrain as the word tener ('to have')-a large and hairy irregular verb-raced after him on its spindly legs...
...remains of the burned-out revolutionary states, in what Philosopher Michael Walzer calls the "failed totalitarianism" that is descended from the classic, frenzied model of Hitler and Stalin and Mao. Such is the case in the Kremlin, which had already put its frozen heart on display with its stunningly barren funeral for Leonid Brezhnev, and now showed the world that it is no more able to mourn others than to mourn...
...powdered charcoal, to the soles and sides of my foot," he said. "I can see the footprints of my boots and the treads in the fine, sandy particles." Minutes later, Armstrong was joined by Edwin Aldrin. Then, gaining confidence with every step, the two jumped and loped across the barren landscape for 2 hrs. 14 min., while the TV camera they had set up some 50 ft. from Eagle transmitted their movements with remarkable clarity to enthralled audiences on earth, a quarter of a million miles away. Sometimes moving in surrealistic slow motion, sometimes bounding around in the weak lunar...
Around the runways of Beirut's international airport, the low, sandbagged bunkers form ragged lines, cluttering a 2½-sq.-mi. stretch of barren, unprotected ground. On two sides the old airport fence topped with barbed wire divides the encampment from the predominantly Shi'ite shantytown of Hay es Sullum, where bombed-out buildings sometimes shelter Muslim fighters armed with mortars and rocket-propelled grenades. In the surrounding hills that rise 3,000 ft. from the plain, Druze and Christian militias clash, igniting the night skies with tracer rounds and exploding shells...
...between, we meet the villagers: cantankerous, narrowly provincial, soaked in religious zeal and, occasionally, intoxicated with a bizarre humor. The desire to escape a barren, futile existence is grimly repressed. It translates into a lurking violence. Three children taunt a woman said to be a hermaphrodite (Cecily Hobbs) and try to impale her on a hoe as if it were a pitchfork. A sadistic stepmother (Amelda Brown) torments her placidly submissive stepdaughter (Tricia Kelly) in order to "feel something." At one point, Val asks Frank: "What are you frightened of?" Frank replies: "Going mad. Heights. Beauty." Says Val: "Lucky...