Word: deaths
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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This baroque gem might have remained under its layers of dust indefinitely except that 1987 marked the 300th anniversary of Lully's death (of an infection that started after he accidentally stabbed himself in the foot with the cane he was using to conduct his music). The anniversary-loving French authorities decided to join with those in Lully's native Italy to finance a hearing for the man who is considered the virtual inventor of French opera...
Stroessner, who provided asylum for some of the most reviled figures in modern times, such as Nazi death-camp doctor Josef Mengele and Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza Debayle, is expected to live out his exile, possibly in Chile. There he would be the guest of Augusto Pinochet, now the very last of Latin America's old-style dictators, who himself faces political extinction following presidential elections scheduled for December...
Jeff is an ordinary-looking man with blow-dried hair, a trim mustache, and thick-lensed eyeglasses that make his eyes look constantly startled, like those of the pets he freeze-dries. Most of Jeff's customers are serious about their pets. They have trouble accepting the death of their loved ones -- Jeff calls it "denying the grieving process" -- so they bring them...
...people have an adverse reaction to Jeff's bizarre service for a number of other reasons too. They prefer to bury or cremate their pets, he thinks, because they don't want to be reminded that their own deaths are looming closer. Jeff's natural customers seem to be yuppie types who not only prefer to deny death, but would also like to deny all that is unpleasant in life. Most of those people have heard about Jeff's service through stories done on him in newspapers from as far away as Britain, and on television and radio shows...
...life, as if I were its next official guest. My teenage sensibilities told me this was something people should not do to one another, and though my father did not think the escapade clever and made me return the chair to the prison that afternoon, my opposition to the death penalty had been formed. Years later, after I have lived more than a decade in the big city, been mugged at gunpoint, and developed, like most of us, a fear of violent crime, my simplistic and sympathetic notion of the murderer as victim has been tempered. My opposition...