Word: operas
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...posh parties. The Dems had arranged volunteers to man the registration desks, and more to serve refreshments. (Even the press were treated to Hostess cupcakes and Twinkies.) Valda Aviks, a doyenne of musical theater most recently seen as Zandra the Crack Whore in a production of Jerry Springer-the Opera turned her considerable lung power to a rendition of The Star Spangled Banner which drew rapturous cheers at the top notes...
...atmosphere was totally different when Suharto died on Jan. 27 from multiple organ failure. For days before his lingering death, people milled around the hospital. Television crews jostled for camera space while news anchors played up the melodrama. It was like opera, with tragedy and comedy served up in equal parts: the tragedy of death, which is final and almost always sad, and the comedy of dignitaries past and present and sundry celebrities falling over themselves for a piece of the global spotlight...
...Suharto's story does make for grand opera: a village boy who grows up into an army general, then acquires absolute power in the wake of a mysterious communist coup and military countercoup. Historians say those tumultuous days in the fall of 1965 sparked half a million murders, and that Suharto and his soldiers were responsible. We students did not know about the killings at the time. If we heard anything bad, we refused to believe it. And if we believed it, we thought it justified. We chose what we thought was freedom against communism. Eventually, many of us changed...
...company opened its first Legoland theme parks, near its Billund birthplace. Parks in Windsor, England, Carlsbad, California and Günzburg, Germany followed, each using around 50 million bricks to create replicas of monuments and landmarks such as the Eiffel Tower, Mount Rushmore, and the Sydney Opera House. Each park receives around 1.4 million visitors per year...
...coraggio!?" an Italian might say with an apt double meaning: "What courage?" and "What gall!" Just 24 hours later, Mastella was already being publicly courted by Silvio Berlusconi, ever-present opposition chief, Prodi archnemesis and former - and would-be future - Prime Minister. Despite its air of overwrought soap opera, Italy's latest government crisis is almost anticlimactic. Prodi took office in 2006 with a razor-thin majority in the Senate, backed by disparate allies who didn't trust each other; most of them possessed enough votes to trigger a collapse. But the fate of the coalition and the career...