Word: coffining
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...scholars. When did Brundage decide to specialize in collecting Eastern art works? "In 1935," he says, "I made a special trip to London to see a .great exhibit of Chinese art there. British experts had brought a whole gunboat load back. Seeing that drove the last nail in my coffin. I've been broke ever since." Now, because of Brundage, the Western world has a rare chance to study the artistic richness of the Orient...
...life for $2,000,000 and letting himself be murdered. He does-and then meets Stripper Ursula, a girl worth living for. Fleeing a corps of assassins, the lovers go to the Himalayas and back by junk, ricksha, sampan, elephant, airplane and balloon. They survive shipwreck in a floating coffin, and even beat off an attack by a fleet of heavily armed Coca-Cola trucks...
...they do, for repatriation is bound up in bewildering red tape and conflicting customs. In Catholic Portugal, for instance, there is no cremation, and embalming must be done by a physician (for fees ranging up to $800). In Italy, where burial customs are still an antiquated lot, the wooden coffins must be a hard-to-obtain three centimeters thick. In France, the coffin must be sealed in the presence of the police, and no fewer than six documents are required to move the body to another town. In Spain, there is an acute shortage of cemetery space for non-Catholics...
...said at his coronation. Later she advised against involvement in Spain and Russia, Napoleon's two biggest mistakes. Eerily vatic, she was "informed" of his death on the very day it happened, 5,000 miles away, and proclaimed with Napoleonic theatricality: "Inexorable history is seated on his coffin." She died in Rome at 86, alone except for a few passing strangers who had paid the janitor a penny for the privilege of watching her last throes. >Louis, the third of Napoleon's four brothers, was a double-gaited dandy who knew a thing or two about bad luck...
...coffinmaker, wreathmaker, funeral-insurance salesman, handyman, business manager, and hearse driver. He is also poor, and in Naples that means powerless. Caught without a chauffeur's license, he is slapped with a staggering fine and forbidden to drive. In debt for tobacco, rent, and worst of all, for coffin lumber, he limps through one hand-mangling day heaving shovelfuls of earth for a huge industrial corporation-and gets fired for incompetence. Employed in a sizzling restaurant kitchen, he is falsely accused of theft, gets fired again...