Word: precious
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...buggy, or crammed aboard the occasional flatbed truck. There are swizzle sticks but no soap; no toilet paper, no plain paper either. By day a pall of smoke hangs over the city: the government, desperate to limit the daily 12- hour blackouts of summer, spent some of its precious cash on cheap, dirty oil to fire the electric plants. But nights are still dark and silent; only the light from the tourist hotels casts a faint glow over the ocean-front Malecon. Havana is a ghost of itself, its once vibrant life leached out by hard times...
...subtleties of language. The filmmakers, clearly delighted with the possibilities of anachronistic dress, sets, and props, can't stop sprinkling them on, even when they're pointless and distracting. Like the abrupt cuts from scene to scene, these anachronisms are jarring and seem altogether a little too precious: a toy robot is set adrift, a bunch of sneakered men are directed in sit-ups by a man in a hooded sweatshirt, and the courtiers at the meeting where Gaveston's exile is discussed are dressed as a bunch of IBM executives. In one mob scene a group of demonstrators wield...
...will it feel to be one clone among hundreds? the anticloners ask. Probably no worse than it feels to be the 3 millionth 13-year-old dressed in identical baggy trousers, untied sneakers and baseball cap -- a feeling usually described as "cool." In mass- consumer society, notions like "precious individuality" are best reserved for the Nike...
...matter, if we get serious about the priceless uniqueness of each individual, many venerable social practices will have to go. It's hard to see why people should be able to sell their labor, for example, but not their embryos or eggs. Labor is also made out of the precious stuff of life -- energy and cognition and so forth -- which is hardly honored when "unique individuals" by the millions are condemned to mind-killing, repetitive work...
...feel like I go to Stanford today," said Will W. Minton '95. "There's some people who say that a tropical island should be put on Cambridge, it can get so cold. This is the last precious moment before the hostility of winter comes...