Word: pains
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...baggy--for 13 dollars in a Veteran's Warehouse on the east side ghetto of my hometown. I could borrow the cummerbund from my roommate, and my mother found an ancient pair of suspenders with leather loops up in the attic. All in all it was a big pain in the ass getting all the clothes together--I wore an oversized pair of black Marine shoes--and I don't see why they want it for a speaking contest, hardly a cotillion...
Nixon's story thus becomes their story, and their story is Woodward and Bernstein's story. It seems clear that all of them talked--except St. Clair, who, as a result, comes across as a pain in the neck and only a second-rate hot-shot. Haig, who now denies everything, was the real motive force: he was the chief of staff and so controlled the flow of paper and visitors, he was a crucial link to Kissinger, he was the only person who seemed to know what everyone else was supposed to be doing when the crunch came...
...resounding stomp of the foot on the mat as each punch is delivered--these are the basic elements of professional wrestling. Second-rate actors like Man Mountain Mike (a quarter ton of lard) and Baron Scicluna use these elements to create a theater of fake violence and feigned pain. The crowd falls for it (the hungering suspension of disbelief), and when the greatest hero (Bruno) meets the most vicious villain (Koloff) their dissembling of pain and terror raises the crowd to levels of cruelty and desperation you don't find in any sport. In sports, the violence is sublimated...
...surface, wrestling seems tawdry and cheap: a couple of overweight men (or women, or midgets) pretending to hurt each other, the crowd taking pleasure in their pain. But professional wrestling appeals to much more than the crowd's delight in random violence, since it shows not mere brutality but a struggle between the forces of good and evil. The program for the match makes it easy to tell one from the other--all the bad guys are listed in the left-hand column. But the crowd already knows most of the wrestlers from television interviews--Bruno, of course, is earnest...
...Holocaust. Stanislav Lushinski is a Polish Jew who survived both the Nazis and the Russians and now works as the U.N. representative for a small African nation. Colleagues mock him as the "P.M."(Paid Mouthpiece), but his past has put him beyond their taunts - and, he hopes, beyond any pain other humans can cause. His cold irony makes him a perfect manipulator of international diplomacy. "Don't try to ram against the inevitable," he advises a young black assistant. "Instead, tinker with the timing." If Lushinski has a tender spot, it is his irritation at being reminded that...