Word: hot-air
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...azure-and-gilt hot-air balloon, a reproduction of an 18th century model, wafted skyward in a "salute to liberty" as thousands of spectators gathered in the Tuileries Gardens last January for the official launch of the bicentennial of the French Revolution. The Republican Guard played a fanfare. An actor solemnly read the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen...
Wheelwright recalls this and subsequent apocalypses from his home in Toronto, where he has lived as an expatriate for 20 years. Assimilation is difficult; Canada is under the perpetual influence of a hot-air mass pumped in by media from the south, and Wheelwright is a U.S. news junkie. As one character puts it, "Television gives good disaster...
...know if he's telling the truth. But his viewers know; Gilliam has used the magic of film to show them the wonders Munchausen has limned. Lovers dance in midair in an underworld waterfall ballroom. The baron sails to the moon in a ship wafted by a hot-air balloon. One of his servants (Eric Idle) outruns a speeding bullet. A terrifying angel of death hovers over the baron, like a fiendish C.P.A. over Gilliam's pricey dreams...
Joyce Brown, a 40-year-old former stenographer, has lived for the past year on a Manhattan sidewalk. Crouched over a hot-air vent, she fended off winter sleet. Panhandling, she dined for $7 a day on juice, a quart of milk, a pint of ice cream and a chicken cutlet from the corner delicatessen. She relieved herself in the gutter, huddled beneath a tattered coat. Crazy or not, Brown claims to know what she wants. "Some people are street people," she says. "That's the life they choose to lead...
...that list, "having an uncanny sense of timing." While panicky investors in lower Manhattan spent Monday jettisoning their stocks like sandbags in a sinking hot-air balloon, the owner of the New York Yankees in the South Bronx reshuffled his management with characteristically reckless impatience...