Word: palmed
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Tourists on Thailand's idyllic Phuket Island, where more than 300,000 visitors annually enjoy palm-lined beaches and seaside restaurants, were hard put last week to find much serenity. The peace was shattered by some 50,000 rampaging residents, angry at the projected opening of a tantalum factory near downtown Phuket. Protesters feared that pollutants from the refining of tantalum, a tin by-product used in the production of electronic equipment, might poison both the island's water supply and its blossoming tourist trade...
Location is as important to detective fiction as it is to the real estate business. The glitz centers of the Sunbelt offer the irresistible drama of drug traffic played against a background of pastel, stucco and palm fronds. Joseph Hansen (Fadeout, A Smile in His Lifetime, Gravedigger) offers an alternative to the macho, down-at-the-heels stereotype. He is David Brandstetter, a Southern California insurance investigator who is affluent, well dressed and homosexual. This subgenre is bicoastal; see George Baxt's novels, beginning with A Queer Kind of Death. The protagonist is a gay New York City police detective...
Every month, it seems, brings news of another paradise lost, and every year new Edens fall like palm trees before a hurricane--first Tahiti, then Bali, then Hawaii, Mykonos, Sri Lanka. The process is, in a sense, irresistible: after all, paradises cannot get better any more than children can grow purer. Each passing season (and each passing tourist) can only bring to the world's forgotten areas new developments--and in a never-never land, any development is a change for the worse. Elysium cannot be universally enjoyed until it has been discovered, and once it is discovered...
...perhaps, that the world's most fabled paradises are being lost each day yet never seem to lose their paradisiac allure. Take Bali, for example, the Indonesian tropical garden visited this spring by President Reagan and the world. Every intruder on the island quickly registers its palm- fringed beaches, magical dances and golden native beauties out of Gauguin and then remarks that all these delights are being corrupted by a camera- toting crush of alien surfers, satyrs and souvenir hunters. The single most changeless feature of Bali, indeed, is this litany of laments. " 'Isn't Bali spoiled,' is invariably...
...virtuous vacation, refulgence not indulgence, is the new favorite of the fitness-minded. "Three or four years ago, I don't think I booked a spa except La Costa," notes Selma Weiner, owner of a travel agency in New York City. "Then suddenly it was Rancho La Puerta, Palm-Aire and Canyon Ranch." About 5 million people now sign up each year, says Edward Safdie, a spa developer. That is up phenomenally from 400,000 five years ago, and Safdie projects 30 million guests annually in five to ten years. To handle the growing popularity, spas are sprouting across...