Word: downtowner
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...United Nations flag flew at half-staff Monday outside the organization's mostly abandoned building in downtown Beirut. The scene was not as tranquil Sunday, when thousands gathered there to protest the killing of 54 Lebanese civilians in an Israeli air strike at Qana. "Resistance, Resistance," the protestors chanted, and a few of them, armed with clubs and tools picked up from nearby construction sites, attacked the building until the crowd was calmed by Muslim clerics. The Lebanese Army watched passively. By contrast, the turnout was tiny later that night at a peaceful candle light vigil in Martyr's Square...
...wave. In no time it had evolved into an acrobatic art form that derived, like ballet, from the eternal human impulse to part the air with style. Skate parks, which first appeared in the 1970s, started out as places meant to draw skaters away from the respectable concrete of downtown. But those early parks tended to be melancholy stretches of concrete with a few bowls and half pipes--that's a semicircular ramp--thrown in. The merest parking lot was more fun. Over the next decade many of the parks closed, victims of underuse and high insurance costs...
...president of Egypt. Anger in Lebanon at the perceived inability or reluctance of the West and leading Arab states to push for a ceasefire is growing stronger by the day. As word spread of the new massacre in Qana, hundreds of rioters attacked the gleaming glass UN building in downtown Beirut, storming the entrance and tearing up the blue UN flag. Even as the bodies were pulled out of the building one by one, Israeli jets continued to fly overhead, striking targets elsewhere, the thump of explosions carrying on the hot breeze. Residents were at a loss to understand...
...that a gentleman in a Cary Grant suit stepped from his plane (itself stewarded by a pillbox-hatted attendant who had served gin martinis) and drove to a local place to eat crunchy fried chicken and flaky blueberry pie. I like to imagine the gentleman then retreated to a downtown hotel where he ordered whiskey in a heavy-bottomed glass cold from a surfeit of ice cubes...
...Eventually I did have a good local meal in Jamestown. In fact I can highly recommend The Brass Rail, downtown, which serves local beef cooked properly and decent ribs (not "Riblets," whatever they are, which Applebee's pushes). But I will go back to Applebee's in the future. I will order only beer to drink, and I will avoid everything but the basics - hamburgers and salads. But it will taste the same every time, and it will feel like it's supposed to, a neighborhood that's nowhere and everywhere...