Word: enigma
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...unlovely country house. In World War II it was home to a collection of English crossword-puzzle addicts, math geeks, even the odd minor poet or two, whose supersecret work on German codes probably shortened the war by months if not years. Their greatest success was in cracking Enigma, the machine-generated numerical language by which the Germans communicated with the submarine wolf packs that preyed on the Atlantic shipping routes vital to Britain's survival...
Directed by Michael Apted and written by Tom Stoppard, the film is faithful (almost to a fault) to Harris' novel. It is particularly true to the grimness and grottiness of life at Bletchley. Enigma plumbs a drama that takes place largely between the ears of the code breakers, a story ideally realized on the printed page, less so on the screen...
...Japanese enigma Nobukazu Takemura tried to up the ante with his live performance, but following initial problems with the machines (always a bad thing at “electronica” shows), the effect was almost numbing. Takemura’s compositions are largely inscrutable—exuberant and tangled webs of bleeps, squelches and drums occasionally verging on 180 beat-per-minute gabba tempos. This was performance, not participatory, music. The audience could do nothing but stand and let the waves of noise wash over them as Takemura and his labelmate Aki Tsuyoko tweaked the controls...
...Bush has his own reasons for visiting now, among them trying to meet the man Jiang has picked as his successor. Hu Jintao remains a mystery even to the Chinese public and is an enigma to Washington. The first time most Chinese heard Hu's voice was during a surprise television appearance in May 1999, when demonstrators protested the U.S. bombing of China's embassy. Hu indicated the protests were good but obliquely urged the participants to return home. More recently he helped conceive the party's initiative to make itself more inclusive by allowing capitalists to join...
...preoccupied with dreamy or violent thoughts of Cupid—or you have reached the state of desperation where you are actually contemplating contacting your Datamatch partners—how could I resist the temptation to add yet another rumination to the infinite pile of theories about the peculiar enigma of Harvard love-life...