Word: plain
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...They're plain wrong," he said, citing medical and scientific evidence. "At and above .10, their brain and central nervous system are literally bathed in enough alcohol to make [the drivers] unsafe pilots," he said...
Locusts and termites are unlikely candidates for an American dinner menu, but they are high-protein foods that nourish many Africans who, argues Anthropologist Marvin Harris, make such choices by preference that developed from necessity. Seemingly bizarre culinary customs are revealed as plain common sense by the author in an insightful and intriguing new book, Good to Eat (Simon & Schuster; $17.95). Citing economic, ecological and health considerations as forerunners of religious, folkloric and even social eating customs, Harris writes, "When India's Hindus spurn beef, Jews and Moslems abominate pork, and Americans barely avoid retching at the thought...
Uncle Sam is always listening. With high-tech spy satellites, ships jammed with electronic gadgetry, super- sophisticated listening posts around the globe and eavesdropping devices--and sometimes with the help of plain old- fashioned human spies--the U.S. constantly monitors many of the key telephone conversations and cable traffic of its friends and foes alike. The U.S. intelligence community does not want to reveal which of these methods it used to listen in as Colonel Gaddafi sent orders from Tripoli to his far-flung terror network. But U.S. officials insist there is little doubt that a fortnight...
...center of the table. These slight departures from absolute regularity give the centered, single image a murmur, no more, of instability. The scheme is one of the most widely known in Spanish painting: the tradition of the bodegon, or kitchen still life, the isolated object against a plain field, brought to its fullest intensity by Zurbaran and Sanchez Cotan in the early 17th century. Echoes of the bodegones continued in Spanish art for hundreds of years; they could still be seen in Picasso's cubist still lifes. But Lopez's skinned rabbit goes straight back to the source, taking...
...absence of a stage, the emphasis on audience contact, and the performers' bare feet and plain dress are part of an implied attack on the tradition of bourgeois realism and its "Western association. Themes of capitalist imperialism, the superpowers' hegemony over East Asia during WWII, Cold War ideology, and the Korean people's long-standing enmity against imperialist Japanese, who colonized Korea from 1905 to 1945, are played out allegorically amidst the liberating outbursts of ritual and dance...