Word: maximus
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...more familiar name is Hollywood. The narrator is hired to write a wide-scream horror movie. To his delight, he learns that a boyhood friend has been signed to create the most dreadful monster in film history. Searching for inspiration, the buddies visit a cemetery across the street from Maximus Films. Abruptly, the body of a long-buried mogul passes in review. Is it an apparition? What about the hideous beast that begins to haunt the Brown Derby restaurant? And the performer who has played Jesus Christ in movies for 25 years: Is he an actor or an authentic Saviour...
...Wonderwall, which connects the two main gates. Though it was designed for a practical purpose, to divert the eye from overhead power lines, fantasy has overtaken function. The fair's master architects, Perez Associates, claim that the Wonderwall was inspired by Piranesi's etching of the Circus Maximus in Rome, but the multicolored Styrofoam and Fiberglas-mesh structure looks more as if it had been dreamed up in a Bourbon Street bar by the design team of Dali and Disney. Grecian urns and Roman busts sit among the rooftops; gilded cherubs toot their horns; alligators double as seats...
Prime Minister Masayoshi Ohira provoked this Circus Maximus by taking a gamble--one most observers thought he would win easily. He dissolved Japan's parliament, the Diet, in September, and called for a new election less than a year after his surprise victory in the last party election. Nothing recent conservative gains in local elections, Ohira saw a chance to buttress his own power with a big victory for the conservative Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), which in recent years has lost the Diet majority it had maintained through the last three decades. Ohira stumped for a tax hike to combat...
...entertainment in the imperial city assumed an influence not unlike that of television today. Armies of Roman unemployed, living on a dole from the state, were diverted by athletic contests and theatrical spectacles. At the Colosseum, some 50,000 watched gladiators in combat with wild beasts. In the Circus Maximus, 260,000 cheered on charioteers as they raced in perilous Ben-Hur style. To supply those circuses, hunters fanned through the empire, caging behemoths and great wild cats. So many animals were rounded up that even then there were endangered species: the hippopotamus was made extinct in Nubia, the lion...
...elegant earl never got around to marrying his son's mother and had a bad habit of keeping worthies like Dr. Johnson cooling their heels for hours in an anteroom attests to the fact that even the most well-intentioned men have been postponers ever. Quintus Fabius Maximus, one of the great Roman generals, was dubbed "Cunctator " (Delayer) for putting off battle until the last possible vinum break. Moses pleaded a speech defect to rationalize his reluctance to deliver Jehovah's edicts to Pharaoh. Hamlet, of course, raised procrastination to an art form...