Word: ritually
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...sarcasm stops when the insurance man learns of a mysterious cult (the "Names" of the title). The ritual murders committed by these ragged, nomadic zealots are as easy as ABC. Their formula, revealed by Owen Brademas, an aged American anthropologist, is based on polyglot alphabets twisted into a system of worship. The killers simply match the initials of elderly or crippled villagers with those of towns. When the sacrificial names collide, their hammers fall. For Brademas, these deaths reveal a new layer of violence: "We thought we knew this setting. The mass killer in his furnished room, in his century...
...Jellicles are assembled for a clan ritual. Annually, the revered elder, Old Deuteronomy, played like a benign biblical patriarch by Ken Page, chooses a deserving Jellicle to ascend "up up up past the Russell Hotel, up up up to the Heaviside Layer," and be born again. While this serves as a passing and somewhat pretentious reminder of Eliot's New England transcendentalism, it does not provide the binding plot line that Nunn obviously hoped it would. As it is, the various Eliot cats come on doing star turns as if they were gifted gypsies eager to escape the anonymity...
Repeating the season's ritual...
Even for the vague, elliptical world of international diplomacy, it was a desultory summit. After a ritual wiping of hands and sipping of tea, the two leaders spent 2½hours (about half of it in translation) exchanging contrary views and, for all intents and purposes, agreeing only to disagree. Then, in an unfortunate conclusion to the visit, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher left her final meeting in Peking with China's senior leader, Deng Xiaoping, only to stumble face first on the broad stairs. The unintended symbolism of the spill in full view of television cameras was not missed...
...Jesus] from Galilee and the Decapolis and Jerusalem and Judea and from beyond the Jordan." This moves the action along briskly, but at the sacrifice of historical detail. Many complicated sections are cut altogether, such as those Old Testament family trees and lists of kings and much of the ritual law in Leviticus...