Word: plumbings
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...West, Japan is now that more familiar quantity, a friend and competitor. And yet the most ambitious of current Japanese films continue to plumb the nation's unique otherness: the traditions of rigorous personal discipline, honor and revenge. As Imamura, the international prizewinner, notes, "I refused to accompany Narayama to Cannes this year, because I thought the film would be misunderstood there. When the people at Toei approached me about submitting it to the festival, I told them to wait 50 years or so. By then we will be understood. And we'll be winning the prize every...
...ceremony was only one reminder that our Government dawdles, wastes, flubs, bumbles-but works. Something is always out of plumb in Washington, and many interested people have come to help out. On some nights the crowded federal city has a significance gap. Stories and lamentations about agency favoritism, staff frictions, congressional capriciousness obscure the sum. "The bottom line is good," insists Ornstein...
...gray area is often the largest, and this is the area judicial bodies are usually loath to enter. Yet this commission claimed the territory. Where the report might easily have shrugged away the problem of blame, asserting that these matters of moral choice are so private no one can plumb them, it said in stead these are private areas of conscience that everyone both understands and experiences, and it is only common sense to acknowledge their existence and to mention what goes on there. The commissioners enhanced the concept of moral responsibility by applying reality to it, a shad part...
...quickly and, it was thought, painlessly. It seemed, in any case, up to date, civilized. (This progressive image is somewhat at odds with the testimony of Willie Francis, 17, who survived a sublethal shock by Louisiana's portable apparatus in 1946. Francis said the experience was in all "plumb miserable." His mouth tasted "like cold peanut butter," and he saw "little blue and pink and green speckles." Added Francis: "I felt a burning in my head and my left leg, and I jumped against the straps." A year later, back in the chair, he was successfully executed...
...sensitivity toward local cultures has led even conservative Protestants to treat tribal religion with respect. Missionaries try to banish belief in, and fear of, evil spirits; yet they also plumb the animist religions for concepts of eternal life or of a remote "high god" or primordial creator that might be used to inspire belief in the one God of the Bible. After all, the missionaries point out, Christmas was originally a pagan rite that ancient preachers turned to good advantage...