Word: bric-a-brac
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MISSED OPPORTUNITY Mme. Chiang Kai-shek, 101, and her family once held sway over China; now her old china's on the block. At an auction of some of her bric-a-brac last week, buyers kept their Jackie fever mostly in check. A bronze automated cathedral clock that was estimated at $8,000 to $12,000 fetched $64,000, and Mme. Chiang's bed went for 16 times its presale estimate. But for $50, someone got her vinyl recliner. And her lazy Susan, priced at $40 to $60, went for just $5. Maybe it wasn't made in Taiwan...
...table, and strings of beer lights criss-cross the ceiling. Worn, olive-colored, leather couches rim the room, making the wait for table time pass in leisurely comfort. The chairs, acquired locally in Jamaica Plain, lend panache to the establishment. The seventies film posters, traffic signs and other bric-a-brac coordinate superbly with the lounge theme...
What of our part-time workers, students, homemakers and the underemployed, who find desperately needed jobs in the shops and post offices, making sure gadgets and bric-a-brac flow from one end of the country to the other? And--to be bluntly self-interested for a moment--if the mass media didn't have holiday advertising to turn to, many of our finest journalists would find themselves suddenly confronted with the real meaning of nonprofit...
...then last week came Sotheby's yard sale of Jacqueline Kennedy's bric-a-brac. Jackie belonged to the founding myth of the '60s. Now the saint's relics of Camelot have turned to kitsch. The gavel-banging crassness of the sell-off may help bring Americans to that objectivity and even disillusionment necessary for what grief specialists refer to as "closure...
...Butt-head are, as he once told Rolling Stone, "breathtakingly horrible. But great. No, not great. Good." One might be tempted to say that Diller embraces contradiction with Zen-like equanimity, although equanimity is probably not a strong suit in someone famous for screaming at underlings and hurling bric-a-brac during meetings. One might also be tempted to say that Diller doesn't like to have things just one way when he can have them more than...