Word: dourness
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...hard to imagine why anyone would want to remake Hurricane in the first place. It is a dour period piece about miscegenation in the South Seas more than a half-century ago, in which the daughter (Mia Farrow) of Pago Pago's American military governor (Jason Robards) falls for the proud native prince of a nearby is land (Dayton Ka'ne, winner of a talent search in which everyone should have looked harder). The only hope for Hurricane would have been turning it into a send-up of the old tropical lagoony genre...
...doubts do not apply to Prime Minister Bazargan, 71, a respected politician known for his honesty and dour demeanor. Bazargan has described himself as a "weak donkey," ill equipped for taking on the formidable task of heading a postrevolutionary government. Last week he named part of his Cabinet, which was evenly divided between moderate politicians and Khomeini followers. Its best-known name was Foreign Minister Sanjabi, 73, head of the opposition National Front. Also included was Ibrahim Yazdi, 47, a former cancer researcher at Baylor University in Texas, who served as Khomeini's aide-de-camp in Paris...
...tribal reality of Baluchistan has caused trouble not only for the Pakistani government but also for Iran. The dour, nomadic Baluch tribesmen who make up 60% of the Pakistani province's 2.5 million population have about 1 million kin in eastern Iran and perhaps 300,000 more in Afghanistan. In 1972 Pakistan's Baluch launched a revolt against the regime of former Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who retaliated harshly over the next four years. At the peak of the fighting, the Shah supplied helicopters and pilots to help 70,000 Pakistani soldiers put down the rebellion...
Seventeenth century artists depicted sober, stiff youngsters, dour in face, erect in posture, adult in demeanor. Life for a child in Puritan New England, after all, was a sobering proposition: one-half of all youngsters died before the age of ten, and those who survived were continually reminded that they had been born in sin and were doomed to hell if they did not submit to the commandments of parent and preacher. To adults, play was a manifestation of a depraved nature, and they tried to coerce their children into becoming models of rectitude. One dictum for raising properly passive...
...unmistakable work of late-19th century architect Stanford White, who also designed the Freshman Union. The hall is remarkably similar in style and scale to the main dining hall of the Union, but in atmosphere the two couldn't be more different. An immense elephant head watches over the dour solemnity of Harvard Hall, silently observing a room where time seems to have stood still around the turn of the century...