Word: beggars
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...person," wrote Shakespeare of the great Queen Cleopatra, "it beggar'd all description." Right, says Edward C. Rochette, editor of the Numismatist. It beggared all description because it was so ugly. His evidence: coins struck during Cleopatra's reign and bearing her image. "Cleo was homely as a toad," claims Rochette. "Do you think a queen of her stature would permit issuance of coins depicting her as homely, if she were a raving beauty...
...still life have none with the consumptive laundresses, wistful acrobats and delicately shaded cripples who populate Picasso's canvases between 1902 and 1906. On one level, they record his experience of the miserable and dehumanizing poverty that lay around him in Paris and Barcelona; on another, the beggar-as-outcast is equated with the artist-as-outsider...
Librettist John Gay (of Beggar's Opera fame) drew upon an ancient Neapolitan myth: in the jealousy of the evil giant Polyphemus drives him to kill Acts, beloved shepherd of the goddess Galatea. Handel's occasionally inspired setting of the text reaches a high-point in the opening of Act Two. This chorus is beautiful and clever, true baroque artifice in a humorous double fugue...
...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...