Word: descented
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That perceived peculiarity is double-edged. On the one hand, some Yale alums still cluck over the spectacle of Giamatti's descent from academic grandeur to the commercial muck of professional sports. If there is a life for former Ivy League presidents, it should be conducted as unobtrusively as possible in a reputable embassy or blue-chip foundation. At the other extreme, certain tobacco-chewing, spit-on-the-hands, belly-up-to-the-bar baseball types wonder what in the hell a gabby professor is doing running a league and, next year, the whole show. Oh, yeah, Giamatti. Whattid...
...crawled into the cramped re-entry vehicle and jettisoned the compartment of the Soyuz craft that contained toilet facilities and living space. They had just settled in to await the firing of the computer-controlled rocket that was programmed to decelerate the spacecraft from its orbital speed for the descent into the atmosphere. Accounts of what happened next differ, but indications are that as the ship passed through a twilight region of space between day and night, an infrared sensor, which fixes the spacecraft's position in relation to earth, was confused by rays of sunlight. The unexpected signal caused...
...week that sometime this fall it aims to start selling briquettes of the material -- packed in shamrock-adorned cardboard boxes containing twelve lbs. each -- in U.S. supermarkets. Ireland's peat harvesters hope the carton of sod will be a popular souvenir item among the 44 million Americans of Irish descent. John Foley, the Turf Board's marketing manager, envisions Americans burning peat on Christmas and St. Patrick's Day. Says he: "There is a market in the U.S., but not as an everyday product." Since not everyone relishes the aroma of burning bog, the peat is unlikely to replace mesquite...
...Orleans is derived from the origins of its inhabitants. The New Orleans Mardi Gras was started by Protestant businessmen. The traditional New Orleans neighborhood guy, sometimes known as a yat -- that character who greets people with "Where y'at?" -- is likely to be of the same Irish or German descent as the Brooklyn dockworker he sometimes sounds like. The person I have known who most naturally fit into the pace of New Orleans -- a person whose normal and astonishingly effective way of keeping appointments was to stroll around the French Quarter, assuming he'd run into the appropriate person...
Everything important in A Handful of Dust is in the film: Brenda's almost somnambulistic descent into adultery; Tony's puttering obsession with his awful hereditary home; the death of their child, the tragedy that brings them to crisis; Tony's final flight up the Amazon toward the novel's immortal conclusion. James Wilby's Tony is stoically wet, and the subtlety of Kristin Scott Thomas' charmlessness as Brenda is awesome. But the malice, as well as the compressed energy of the novel, is beyond Sturridge and Granger. Waugh moved us to tears; this adaptation invites only respect...