Word: peculiarities
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...when it was announced that President Jiang Zemin would speak at Harvard, I found myself facing a peculiar, foreign impulse: I had the vague beginnings of what one might call "the urge to protest." At first the idea struck me as so misplaced that I nearly laughed it off. But as I followed the coverage of Jiang's American tour, his facility in avoiding any head-on confrontation started to irk me. Eventually I decided that it wouldn't hurt if Jiang--a man who just last week called the government-sponsored shootings at Tiananmen square "the correct conclusion"--knew...
...abnormalities was the groundwater, and that tadpoles raised in tanks that contained more than 50 percent Minnesota water led to a very high deformity rate. This is the same groundwater that is considered safe enough to be used for drinking. For those who might think this is a problem peculiar to Minnesota, the high frequency of deformed frogs has been found in Japan and southern California. More importantly, these species could be serving as the environment's proverbial canary, much like the ones used by miners decades ago. And the frogs may point to a serious problem with the water...
Making matters worse, my relations with my roommate were extremely poor, to the point of near-violence, as I eventually informed my Senior Tutor. He and I should both be thankful for Mather's peculiar architecture, which insures singles for all of its students; for otherwise, I fear that one or both of us would not have lived through the semester...
...past life, this humble worm could have been your mother." Meanwhile, in Martin Scorsese's Kundun, scheduled to open on Christmas Day, the protagonist muses, "My enemies will be nothing. My friends will be nothing. All will be nothing." This is spoken not morbidly but philosophically--a most peculiar sentiment in a Hollywood film, even one made for a mere $30 million...
...Stone publicly conscripts Tibetan "wrathful deities" to fend off his detractors; Courtney Love is said to be a practitioner, while Harrison Ford simply supports Tibetan freedom (his wife Melissa Mathison wrote Kundun's script). Composer Philip Glass, yes. REM singer Michael Stipe, maybe. And in one of the more peculiar occurrences along the Hollywood-Lhasa axis, action-film star and all-around surly guy Steven Seagal was recognized by the head of the venerable Nyingma Tibetan lineage as the reincarnation of a 15th century lama...