Word: ruritanians
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...premier policymaking body, and he has held more Cabinet sessions in five months than Botha did in his final two years. More refined than the boorish Botha, De Klerk has done away with some of the trappings of autocracy: the plumes and feathers of the State President's Ruritanian guard have been relegated to a museum. While Botha relaxed by shooting wild animals, De Klerk plays golf...
...army officer whom some regarded as the Bismarck of Persia. Flying high on his magic carpet, the Shah seemed out of touch with the forces gathering against him. Resentment of his Western ways was fanned by the Muslim clergy. Intellectuals, students and professionals thought the figure posing in Ruritanian uniform and a Disneyland crown was not Western enough. These dissenters frequently attracted the attention of the security police (SAVAK), whose interview techniques shocked the world and hastened the coming of Ayatullah Khomeini's vengeful theocracy...
...Chicago, the Terra Museum of American Art has a different agenda. Daniel Terra, 76, head of Lawter International Inc., the Illinois-based manufacturing firm, raised millions for Ronald Reagan's campaign fund and was given the Ruritanian honorific of "Ambassador-at-Large for Cultural Affairs" -- as though culture, to an Administration that spends virtually as much on military bands as on the National Endowment for the Arts, were a foreign state. Ambassador Terra, as he likes to be called, is an enthusiastic buyer of 18th, 19th and early 20th century American...
...emblematic of this never-never year that the movies were upstaged not by stars like the newly slender Robert De Niro, the long-haired Mel Gibson or the wasp-waisted (and pathologically tardy) Elizabeth Taylor, but by that Ruritanian dazzler Princess Diana (called "Lay-dee Dee" by the French), escorted by her Prince. Yet even the royals could not dodge the toxic waft of melancholy. On the day of their visit, French TV announced the death of Rita Hayworth, whose signature film Gilda had played at Cannes' first postwar festival, in 1946. The news was a poignant reminder that...
...movies to get out of themselves, to share the intense, expansive communal experience of being in the dark, with the huge screen the only light. That experience was easier to achieve when movie theaters were huge, gaudy palaces with plush appointments and ushers dressed like Ruritanian footmen. Alas, those theaters have been razed or, worse, sliced into half-a-dozen small auditoriums that are about as attractive as the men's rooms in Chinatown restaurants. Why should anyone over 18, or not on a date, go to a noisy, rowdy theater with poor projection and get glop on his shoes...