Word: garish
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This is the type of human drama that fills the bizarre literary world of novelist John Irving. The author of the 1978 bestseller, The World According to Garp, Irving writes with a perpetual sense of impending doom--at any time some sort of garish literary vehicle similar to Claudio's fateful truck can roar by and rip away everything familiar and safe. In Garp, penises fly, ears get chomped, tongues are replaced with stitches, and death always looms. "In the world according to Garp," Irving explains, "an evening could be hilarious and the next morning could be murderous...
...Chichón. But there are troubling signs. A huge smoglike cloud from the volcano has been spotted at scattered locations around the globe. At the Kitt Peak National Observatory, near Tucson, astronomers say the brightness of stars has been reduced by 40%, and volcanic dust has created garish sunsets over wide areas of the Northern Hemisphere. Says Atmospheric Physicist James Pollack, of NASA's Ames Research Center, which has used U-2 aircraft to collect samples of El Chichón's dust: "This is the biggest volcanic cloud we have had in the last two decades...
...skyscrapers that deface the ancient skyline of Jerusalem, the pornography found in its theaters, the garish nightclubs-all are the result of rapid Western industrialization under Israeli rule. Jerusalem must not be treated as just another tourist attraction like New York, Holly wood or the French Riviera. To their credit, the Israelis do protect the religious places. But it is not merely individual shrines that are sacred; the entire city is holy. An internationalized Jerusalem governed by a commission headed by the chief religious leaders of Judaism, Christianity and Islam would spare the city from further secularization...
America's oldest city is the site of one of its strangest attractions, a garish attempt to capitalize on the successful cartoon series and paperback books by the same name. Thing is, it works. There is something awe-inspiring about seeing the heaviest living man sitting outside on a chair the size of a Mazda. How about a wax representation of a man with three eyes? Don't knock it til you've seen it, or the shrunken heads, either. While you're in the area, check out Fort Castillo a quizzical structure with eight-foot thick walls made...
...large chorus members. Randolph's speaking voice, a natural British accent dulled somewhat by his moving to New Jersey, seems a bit odd in a story that takes place in Peru. Likewise, the sets, colorful but subtle hues that provide a good background for the sometimes intentionally garish costumes, look very little like anything in any Latin American country that I've ever seen. But this is opera; we shouldn't ask any questions...