Word: burma
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Nearly 2000 high school students hailing from locales throughout North America came to the Harvard campus yesterday to represent countries such as Burma, Mozambique, and Cameroon in an effort to solve world conflicts...
...Besides Burma, the U.S. is the only nation in the world that has not formally begun converting to metric. There was a time, while Britain was the U.S.'s major trading partner, when it would have been economic suicide to consider switching to metric. In fact, it was precisely such arguments that torpedoed Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson's proposal that the U.S. adopt a decimal-based system in 1790. A study 31 years later by his successor, John Quincy Adams, was similarly unpersuasive. But in 1866, Congress, charged by the Constitution with establishing the nation's weights and measures...
Jungle vines long ago began to reclaim the railway leading to the famous bridge on the River Kwai that the Japanese brutally built with Allied POWs and Asian laborers during World War II. Today the Burma-to-Thailand railway, whose bridge inspired a book and movie, is patronized mostly by Westerners visiting the graves of soldiers who worked on it. Hoping to tap such tourism, Thai entrepreneurs propose a $38.5 million reconstruction to turn the decaying area into an amusement park. Survivors of the bloody trail are not amused, however, and compare the idea to refurbishing Auschwitz as a Disneyland...
WHEN I FIRST SAW VOLCANO SUNS three years ago, they were a nascent three-piece outfit featuring drummer Peter Prescott, formerly of Mission of Burma. At the time, they were playing with the wretched Ben Vaughan Combo, opening up for a Violent Femmes show. The trio's songs were rough, half-improvised ditties with common foods like popcorn and margarine being the typical subject matter. It's no wonder I did not think much of them...
...last sight I remember on leaving Burma is 2,000 dots on the landscape as the plane rose out of Pagan, good old Burma Air. I'd only changed $15 with Tourist Burma, but I had three bags of Burmese lacquerware and a full-size traditional puppet, and I don't know where I lost all my tapes and T-shirts. Must have been those crazy Burmese--an especially tricky people...