Word: riotous
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...appearance of umbrellas at these parades is like some ancient ritual. In the beat of the music, a dance will sometimes throw his umbrella on the ground--handle pointing skywards--and writhe around it in a riotous, sensual dance. If you ask him where he learned to do that with his umbrella, he will say, "Man, they always done this at parades!" or "My daddy done that!" It is a remnant of some long-forgotten rite. An astute observer once described that scene as "some vanished ritual grandeur of humanity that has been lost in the stones, the jungle...
...CENTURY has been so crowded that each generation seems like an entire age, and the Paris of the Twenties in the memoirs of Fitzgerald and Hemingway appears as remote to us as the literature of the nineteenth century must have been to them. Surrealism is no more than a riotous fantasy rooted in the past; the period between the Wars emerges as a violent dream...
Islam and Socialism. Not so easily dismissed is the volatile combination of riotous students and their champion, ex-Minister Bhutto. A compelling orator, Bhutto is the scion of a powerful Pakistani family, and a graduate of both Berkeley and Oxford. He joined Ayub's first Cabinet at 30. As Foreign Minister from 1963 to 1966, Bhutto took a belligerent line with India, and engineered Pakistan's "Red shift" toward China and away from the U.S. He was the most popular man in the Cabinet by 1966, when Ayub sacked him in order to bring Pakistan back toward...
...worthless grocery store from a wily Indian named Fakhru. Fakhru fleeces Fong daily, ultimately conning him into buying 27 cases of black-market UNICEF milk, on the unlikely chance that the regular milk train will be derailed by revolutionary terrorists. Meanwhile, Fong becomes a political pingpong ball in a riotous contest between Chinese Communists and American agents, both of whom have somehow concluded that Fong is a pivot in the ideological struggle between East and West. Fong endures it all with the patience of a grinning Buddha: "As a carpenter he did not have to grin...
Amidst all this, both parties are rushing ass-backwards toward the nominations of the two dullest candidates in the field--Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey. Party leaders on both sides, as reports from the governors' conference in Cincinnati suggest, view this prospect with something less than riotous enthusiasm. They seem to think that the screaming, grabbing, tugging, and titers may be more than discontent over rising crime rates and Vietnam...