Word: parchments
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...great secrets of World War II was that from November 1944 to April 1945 the Japanese floated over North America some 9,000 small bombs in paper balloons made of tightly glued pieces of parchment-like paper. Only about 280 are known to have reached the U.S. and hit the ground - in Ore gon, Wyoming, Montana and as far in land as Iowa. The Japanese had hoped the bombs, launched into the Pacific jet streams, would ignite forest fires in the Pacific Northwest and panic...
...very nicely done too-is the way everyone reverts instantly to childhood in moments of crisis. Moriarty (Leo McKern) is set up as a math wizard, for example, but his blackboard is covered with a second-grader's mistakes. When he conducts an auction of the purloined parchment, he is reduced to counting on his fingers as he tries to convert francs into pounds. Later Moriarty and DeLuise (playing a hammy opera singer) squabble over the document in a manner more appropriate to four-year-olds disputing possession of a pail in a sandpile-nose twisting, cheek pinching, hair...
...decorative pattern breaks up the surface. It volatilizes what once was solid, rendering substance−bronze, stucco, tile or parchment−almost immaterial. This was no less true of relatively small objects like a 13th century Syrian canteen in silver inlaid brass (see color page), with its elaborate conflation of Islamic and Christian imagery arranged in dense concentric bands, than of vast architectural projects like the tile-work of the Alhambra in Granada. It is hard−perhaps impossible−to hold the entire pattern in one's mind, even when looking...
...clockmaker, amid all the stopped clocks of his shop, places his parchment ear against an out-of-tune grandfather's clock; a barber, with a dry brush, lathers the cheekbones of an actor learning his role, studying the script with hollow sockets: a girl with a laughing skull milks the carcass of a heifer...
...professor Paul Freund had occasion to recall his second meeting with Oliver Wendell Holmes. "We went up to the second floor study, where Holmes was seated, starched and stiffly erect in his ninety-third year, behind his desk. He wore a black cutaway and striped trousers, his skin was parchment, his hair luxuriant and silver, his cavalryman's moustachioes abundantly flowing." Freund remembered...