Word: dragons
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...peered through the boards. Even in the semi-darkness, he could see smoke coming from the dragon's nostrils. "Hard to believe," he said several times...
Sorry Awakening. Today, a quarter of a century ahead of Orwell's timetable, a plump peasant who was born a subject of the Dragon Throne, is well on his way to converting Orwellian nightmare into reality in the world's most populous nation. In the past eight months, Mao Tse-tung has herded more than 90% of mainland China's 500 million peasants into vast human poultry yards called "people's communes." If Mao's historic gamble succeeds, the ordinary Chinese of day after tomorrow will have no fixed job, no home and no real...
...front end (concessions, games of chance) got a big play too. A muscular cowpoke swung a big wooden mallet and sent a weight soaring up a wire to clang a gong. He strutted off like a dragon slayer. "The guy can rig that bell any way he wants to," said an operator. "He twists a knob, and you'll never hit the bell; he twists it back, and you'll hit it every time." Over where the flatties (dishonest concessionaires) worked the barrel ball game, the toss of a ball into a barrel won a prize. But someone...
...translating the machine-tooled commonplaces of U.S. life into a surreal landscape of fantasy, a kind of Poe-like, gadget-haunted region of Weir. Thus a soda-fountain stool violently revolves into a "tall mushroom," a newly screwed-in electric bulb lights up with "the hideous instancy of a dragon's egg hatching in one's bare hand." It is the strength of Nabokov's imagination that makes the characters in these stories live. It is the weakness of his characters that they can live only in their imaginations...
...what one contemporary called "a sweet contest of nature and of man," Murano's craftsmen reached their greatest peak as they learned to twist glass into all manner of sizes and shapes. At its best, as in the dragon stem goblet (opposite), the Venetian artists managed to capture the same excitement in movement and space that held Tinoretto entranced. This Venetian love of bravura effects reached a flamboyant finale just before the development of heavy potash glass in Germany and lead glass in England broke Venice's near monopoly. Glass blowers made wine goblets in the forms...