Word: beggaring
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Paris last week a beggar on the steps of Sacré-Coeur displayed a hastily scribbled sign: "Dollars are no longer accepted." In Kampala, Uganda, where the dollar used to bring 10 shillings on the black market, safariing Americans were lucky to get five. And in Zurich, hardhearted whores gave only three Swiss francs to the dollar, instead of the official...
...playlet takes place on an idyllic Sunday in an idyllic country town, where strollers shower coins and smiles on the local beggar, and husbands treat their wives with adoring deference. Eventually, in all the town's houses and apartments, everyone sits down to Sunday lunch. One after another, the husbands discover flies in their soup. Smiles turn to frowns, soothing words to cross ones. Insults are delivered and returned. Crockery goes smashing. Soup (with flies) pours in torrents from under doors. The police arrive. The civic disturbance turns, absurdly, into global war, and then into an atomic Armageddon...
...Beggar's Opera. Achievement such as Wild's does not go unnoticed, and one day in front of Old Bailey a betrayed colleague named Blueskin Blake tried to cut the Thief-Taker General's head off with a dull knife. He failed. In 1725, though, Wild was sentenced to be hanged by a corrupt judge (appropriately, on false evidence that he had received a bit of stolen lace). Wild died wealthy, though. During his career the reward for giving evidence rose from ?40 to ? 140, or from $2,000 to $7,000 in modern money, as Author...
Defoe wrote about Wild, and so did Fielding (The Life of Mr. Jonathan Wild the Great). John Gay used him as the model for Peachum ("Impeach 'em") in his Beggar's Opera. The story can stand any amount of retelling, and Howson's is full of wonderful oddments: at Old Bailey in Wild's time, trials were conducted in the open air regardless of weather; the original Jenny Diver sat in church with false, gloved hands folded primly across her stomach, while her real ones picked adjacent purses. There are also some linguistic notes: "Rattling...
...rock and roll, the Stones are one of the groups most frequently cited. (The others would probably be the Airplane and John Lennon.) The idea of the Stones as a political rock and roll band seems to stem from "Street Fighting Man" and a few other cuts on Beggar's Banquet. But the words of "Street Fighting Man," aside from the title, are just the bored and decadent musings of a spoiled rock star and, under analysis, have political perceptions about as acute as "Okie From Muskogie" or "Please Please...