Word: contests
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Although Jordan’s teasing stands out as one of my most unforgettable camp moments, my summers at Hillard gave me non-harassing memories as well. I won the counselors’ crazy dive contest, and watched two dozen off-key 8-year-old girls sing Simon and Garfunkel’s “Feelin’ Groovy.” I recommended that Lily read The Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, and the very next day she said she’d gotten it from the library, read it and loved it. I told...
...tension--for what? Well, in this competition, to spell words you'll probably never use--or even hear again--in any form of civilized discourse. Director Jeffrey Blitz is sympathetic to the eight kids he follows through this agony, and they and their parents largely seem to have the contest in wry perspective. And we do get caught up in their fates. Implicitly, Blitz seems to be asking but not quite answering this question: What's the point of all this? The ability to spell is a sign of neither virtue nor brains. It's just a skill some people...
...Despite spending half a century in a painful, unprecedented process called Vergangenheitsbewältigung (coming to terms with the past), Germany hasn't forged a wholly new identity to supplant the old one. And Germany may be the (now humbled) powerhouse, but Italians consider themselves the winners of another contest: Where Would You Rather Be? They make up less than 2% of foreign visitors to Germany, while Germans make up 25% of visitors to Italy, and spend some €8 billion there each year. Italians can't blame them for that; by and large, they still view Germany...
...Proposal Add this to the already bloated annals of fat-cat pay: a U.S. arbitration panel last week upheld a $23.6 million severance payout for Jean-Marie Messier, the ousted CEO of Vivendi Universal. Jean-René Fourtou, Messier's successor, described the payout as "indecent" and promised to contest the decision. He has little room for maneuver: the payout was written into a U.S. contract agreed to last July by two Vivendi directors, Marc Viénot and Edgar Bronfman Jr., to persuade Messier to depart quickly and quietly. The full board rejected the contract days later, after Messier...
Canada's federal government decided last week not to contest the rulings of three provincial courts that had all come to the conclusion that denying homosexuals the right to marry violated Canada's constitutional commitment to civic equality. What that means is that gay marriage has now arrived in the western hemisphere. And this isn't some euphemism. It isn't the quasi-marriage now celebrated in Vermont, whose "civil unions" approximate marriage but don't go by that name. It's just marriage--for all. Canada now follows the Netherlands and Belgium with full-fledged marital rights for gays...