Word: enigma
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This was, however, an unusual election, and not just in the outcome. Outwardly democratic, it was in fact an exercise in political ruthlessness. The TV marathons that tracked Unity's surge were the nearest to Western-style elections that these polls got. Much of the campaign was an enigma. There were few rallies, cross-country tours by party leaders, debates or televised appeals. Instead there was what Russian politicians euphemistically call technology: a stream of invective on state TV. Most of this was instigated by the Kremlin and aimed at discrediting the one bloc thought to present any risk...
...number cruncher. (The sexy image was reversed--for the few bohemians who saw it--by the 1998 art-house flick [pi], the story of a psychotic, self-mutilating mathematician who discovers a very big number that holds the secrets of the universe.) Books on mathematics, such as Fermat's Enigma and A Beautiful Mind, the tale of a schizophrenic mathematical economist who wins the Nobel Prize, hit best-seller lists here and abroad. (I came to appreciate the eclectic taste of our friends across the pond when my book The Man Who Loved Only Numbers shared the London Times best...
...three years, Clemmons, 42, who runs a hair-care-products company and has no formal scientific training, has devoted her spare time and more than $10,000 of her own money to solving everyone's favorite engineering enigma: how the Egyptian pyramids were built. Over the years, researchers have experimented with everything from ramps to levers in failed attempts to move counterparts of the three-ton pyramid stones...
...Three To Tango, Perry's latest crack at big-screen stardom, the actor finds himself paired oh-so-cutely with Neve Campbell, an actress who has a become a bit of an enigma herself. Too mature to continue dabbling in teen flicks but still too young and cherubic to be taken seriously in adult fare, Campbell has shifted into that rare phase of an acting career in which she doesn't quite seem to fit in anywhere. Poor Neve. First she was abused all last season on "Party of Five," and now she's stuck in acting limbo...
...groups is a task I believe to be beyond anyone lacking advanced degrees in theology, political science, sociology and counter-terrorism. In fact, I have yet to meet anyone--native or otherwise--who claims to understand politics here. To paraphrase Churchill's opinion of the USSR, "It's an enigma wrapped in a mystery wrapped in a code." I don't quite get it, but I take comfort in the fact that nobody else seems to, either...