Word: exotica
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...months later, Columbia will bear a $55 million payload named Astro-1 that includes three ultraviolet telescopes and two wide-angle cameras. For much of the mission, the instruments will be studying such exotica as quasars, black holes and globular clusters, but for a while during the days that the five international probes encounter the comet, all of Columbia's eyes will be on Halley's. One of the Astro-1 telescopes will peer at very short wavelength light to see if it can detect such elements as helium, neon and argon, which would reveal something about what temperatures were...
Capitalizing on the rage for things Oriental that had also seized writers such as Pierre Loti and Gustave Flaubert and scholars like Sir Richard Burton, the Orientalist artists vied with one another in seeking out exotica. Harems aside, the subjects that most mesmerized them were slave markets, carpet bazaars, whirling dervishes, Arab stallions, caravans of caparisoned camels and wind-whipped burnooses of Bedouins on the sands of the Sahara. "There is a fortune to be made for painters in Cairo," noted William Makepeace Thackeray on a visit to Egypt in 1844. "I never saw such a variety of architecture...
Everybody was trying to figure out what to make of the roughly 1.5 million Americans who poured into England between July 1943 and Dday, introducing many Britons to such exotica as jitterbugging, Jeeps and even pitchers' mounds. When a mound was installed in Wembley Stadium for a baseball game between two U.S. service teams in early June 1944, the London Times informed puzzled readers that "its use adds to the speed of throw." Despite their far-reaching empire, many Britons, particularly in the smaller towns, had never seen a black man until the G.I.s arrived...
Tastes have changed slightly, too. "Kids, eat a little lighter and more sophisticated today," Mr. Bartley says, so the Cottage menu now sports salads and such exotica as hummus and tabbouley salad, and potato skins with guacamole. But the specialty of the house has not changed. "People like hamburgers--they always have and they always will," he says...
...kinky vampire who becomes suddenly susceptible to the ravages of old age and bad living. This may be a case of a movie feeding off an old myth, or a fresh myth being created to help a new movie; in any case, Bowie's musical excursions into sexual exotica, like John, I'm Only Dancing, have always seemed more like exercises in style than specific autobiography. His gay following was strongest, not surprisingly, in the Ziggy days, even though Bowie now claims that all the camp panoply was just "an image...