Word: merci
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PARIS: Dieu merci for the World Cup. As this year's Tour de France wilts under a barrage of midnight drug raids and cycling teams' quitting in protest, TIME Paris bureau chief Thomas Sancton says, France's successful staging of the Coupe de Monde is saving the nation from cultural humiliation and putting the blame for the fiasco where it belongs: on the rotten state of international cycling. "The whole thing just stinks," he says. "The intense nationalism, the publicity and the big-money sponsors have pressed riders to achieve superhuman feats, and many have turned to performance-enhancing drugs...
Burne-Jones' girls have often been ridiculed for their insipid and standardized look, but they have a way of breaking out into an obsessional character--as La Belle Dame Sans Merci. One of his best friends was Algernon Charles Swinburne, the English poet who was a votary of sadomasochism; and time and again, Burne-Jones' haughty damsels with their downturned mouths and leonine manes suggest the imperious sex goddesses of Swinburne's imagination, such as Dolores, with her "cruel/ Red mouth like a venomous flower...
...muted rhythms of "The Flower Called Nowhere" subsided, a voice from the anonymity of the crowd requested, "Take me to your laboratory!" Murmurs flittered through the previously subdued crowd as if some unspeakable sanctity was breached--but Stereolab remain unphased. The usual "merci beaucoup" followed, and the six-person outfit continued their audio exploration...
...this point Pentheus has been doomed and the Bacchant chorus is praising the sweetness of vengeance. The scene is creepier than mere Halloween fantasy. The immediacy of Williams' language, its claim on the play's disturbing juxtaposition of beauty and inclemency (the chorus as, perhaps, "Les Belles Dames Sans Merci"?) must be what attracted Walker, Harper and the rest of the staff...
...easy. It took importuning from the President of the U.S., a high-level meeting with nearly every big shot on Clinton's foreign-policy team, capped by a 21-gun salute on the Pentagon grounds. Thus flattered, His Excellency deigned to say a merci. The Clinton people sighed with relief...