Word: plasticity
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...Crowded into a small room only seven members are left of an extended clan of more than twenty. Four men were chosen to stay behind to protect the building and watch over the family's elderly blind matriarch, too ill to move. The doors and windows are covered with plastic taped to the frames. A small yellow bird, like a finch, known locally as a "taral hob" or the bird of love, is kept in a cage just outside. "When it dies we know we might too," says one of the men, Ali Rauf Noori. "There are no guarantees here...
When we went to brunch on Sunday morning, the card checker was wearing one of those flocked plastic top hats you can buy at party supply stores. The tables were spread with white cloths anchored by vases of roses, and the little paper cards taped to the sneeze guard announced entrée names riddled with cedillas: Chicken Français! Tomato Provençal! Harvard University Dining Services rarely affects this level of sophistication when juniors’ parents aren’t in attendance; clearly, something was afoot...
While I doubted very much that any diva who had just captured a golden statue would be eating Chicken Français à la HUDS, and while it was difficult to see how outfitting the kitchen staff with plastic top hats would catch us up on any film other than 1935’s Ginger Rogers-Fred Astaire spectacular “Top Hat” (which garnered four Oscar nominations but not a single win), I found HUDS’ efforts touchingly quixotic. How deeply invested in the Academy Awards could any Harvard student be? The awards?...
...then I remembered how I felt about the Oscars. The students filling out their Oscar predictions Sunday, the card checker’s bobbing plastic top hat presiding over them, guessing the candidates whom they found most deserving—knowing full well that the Academy does not always choose the most deserving candidates. Our admiration for the men and women of the Academy does not make us think they are infallible (this is a body, after all, that nominated “The Hours” for nine awards); we don’t hesitate to make...
Craig, or “Billy Dee Adams,” wrapped himself in cellophane plastic for the talent competition—for which the contestants were supposed to don formal attire—and performed an “oral hygiene” dance which left the entire room smelling of mouthwash...