Word: lap
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...warm and humid June day a few weeks before Hong Kong's old Kai Tak Airport closed in 1998. I'd filed a feature for a British newspaper about the spanking new airport at Chek Lap Kok and had an afternoon free. Normally I would have gone shopping for presents, but was spared that dreadful ordeal as I'd heard about a crazed band of plane spotters who gathered at Kai Tak to watch the planes land...
...With Kai Tak gone, many Hong Kong residents are understandably proud of its replacement, Chek Lap Kok (its drab proper name is the Hong Kong International Airport). It is undoubtedly a well-designed, efficient, world-class facility. Inside it is everything Kai Tak wasn't?spacious, airy and, with an inventive use of natural light, a little too bright for some when the morning sun catches those check-in desks. But it's also like so many international airports nowadays: somewhat soulless and homogenized. You could be in Schipol or Singapore. One reason Kai Tak is still held in such...
...thus it was that Jefferson had the glorious honor of composing, on a little lap desk he had designed, some of the most famous phrases in history while sitting alone in a second-floor room of a home on Market Street in Philadelphia just a block from Franklin's house. "When in the course of human events ..." he famously began. Significantly, what followed was an attack not on the British government (i.e., the ministers) but on the British state incarnate (i.e., the King). "To attack the King was," as historian Pauline Maier notes, "a constitutional form...
...sunny, chiming sound of lucky breaks and happy coincidences. Like the time last year when, after three years of being ignored by record companies, the Thrills' demo tape suddenly sparked a bidding frenzy that led them to Virgin Records. Or the time that same demo landed in the lap of Mancunian gloom-rocker Morrissey, who invited them to play their first London show - opening for him at the prestigious Royal Albert Hall last September. Although Deasy insists "it's the lazy assumption that this is just a summer album," these tunes wouldn't sound quite right on a rainy...
After weeks of pressure to explain what it knew about the alleged weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq before launching the war there, the Bush Administration has placed the issue in CIA Director George Tenet's lap. Administration officials have been subtly pointing the finger in his direction, saying all their knowledge of Iraq's weapons programs came from Tenet's agency. That apparently didn't apply to a British intelligence report, cited by President Bush in his State of the Union speech, that claimed Iraq had tried to purchase uranium from an unnamed nation later identified as Niger...