Word: mud
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...wartime India, en route to Britain from naval duty, British architect Laurie Baker met Mahatma Gandhi, who challenged him to return after the war to help house India's poor. In 1945, Baker did. Using mud, brick and other local materials, he engineered innovative, exuberant structures, many with pierced brick screens that dappled light and cooled rooms with natural air movement. Baker's low-cost, eco-friendly style, which became known as the "Baker method," inspired an organization of younger Indian architects that has, since the '80s, built homes for more than 10,000 poor families...
...first marathon was very interesting. I woke up, and it was pouring rain. The streets of the city were flooded ankle deep; there was ankle deep mud,” Conroy recalls. “This continued the whole day. By the end of [the race] you’re hypothermic. You’re absolutely freezing...
...beat the reader over the head with a political message, but rather a moving description of an army life reminiscent of the Vietnam War—filled with drug use and instructions to ignore the safety on a gun. One soldier even imitates Rambo, covering his face with mud and asking to take a rebel village by himself. For Beah, who describes the world through a fish-eye lens, the devil is in such details. But Beah has taken upon himself a topic worthy of aerial photography. Even though Beah has left the big-picture politics out, the reader cannot...
Camouflage is not all it seems. When man first daubed himself in mud, dressing to fool the eye was the art of the hunter rather than of the prey. Its use in military defense, according to "Camouflage," an exhibition at London's Imperial War Museum until November, evolved as a result of the advent of long-range precision weaponry. Only in 1915, when the French army established a specialist camouflage unit, did the study of concealment, distortion and deception techniques begin. But it was art, not military science, that led the way. "Armies realized they could put artists' knowledge...
...From there, the tour plunges straight into the heart of the old city, where the centuries-old Shor bazaar has changed little from the days when it was thronged with Silk Road traders. In the narrow, twisting alleyways of the bird market, drab mud-brick shops burst with the vibrant plumage of parakeets and fighting quails, while the air is filled with the bright chatter of songbirds, the favored pets of Kabul residents. Handcrafted bamboo and wire cages, festooned with glass beads, dangle from every doorway, and the fragrance of cardamom-laced green tea beckons passersby into tiny chai shops...