Word: saint
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Plenty of other countries presumably share insecurity complexes about their nationhood: Central African Republic (which sounds like it was named by a particularly uninspired committee), French Guiana (not to be confused with Equatorial Guinea, Guyana or Guinea-Bissau) and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines (a collection of islands that sounds like it also could be an up-and-coming lounge act). But East Timor's problems are compounded by the fact that its population of just under 1 million is commonly referred to by no fewer than four names. Even though less than 10% of the population speaks Portuguese...
Oscar Wilde was dying - and broke. the declining writer was taken in by the proprietor of the Hôtel d'Alsace in Paris' Saint-Germain-des-Prés neighborhood, who tried to make him comfortable, plied him with Courvoisier and tolerated his snowballing bill. But Wilde still didn't spare his room's decor; he wryly observed that "my wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or the other of us has to go." The wallpaper won that battle - Wilde died a month later of meningitis, on Nov. 30, 1900 - but it didn...
...distinguished priest and liberal luminary-Robert Drinan died earlier this year, the Washington Post published a special appreciation. It ran together with a tribute to another notable who died just one day later: Barbaro. The horse got top billing. And does anyone remember when Mother Teresa died? The greatest saint of our time died on the frenzied eve of the funeral of the greatest diva of our time, Princess Di. In the popular mind, celebrity trumps virtue every time. And consider Russian composer Sergei Prokofiev, tormented in life by Stalin, his patron and jailer. Prokofiev had the extraordinary bad luck...
...long ago, the spectacle of fashion was in the fabric, not the celebrity-filled front row. The material mattered more than the scene?more than the next It handbag. I remember visiting Yves Saint Laurent's studio for an haute couture preview when the designer himself was still working, fitting dresses on models. Saint Laurent and his aide-de-camp Loulou de La Falaise were yanking huge bolts of color-saturated Abraham silk down from the shelves and spinning out a fantasy scene of a hot summer day in New Orleans circa 1860, complete with big taffeta skirts and wide...
...names of the famous fabric houses: Ratti, Bucol, Gandini, Clerici, Guigou, Mantero and, of course, Abraham, the Swiss fabric house owned by Gustav Zumsteg, the late, great textile designer who invented the stiffly finished silk gazar that gave shape to Balenciaga's gowns and who also collaborated with Saint Laurent, Coco Chanel and Hubert de Givenchy...