Word: scratch
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Contrary to such statements, the aim of the Peace Corps was never to spread the American Dream like so much butter over needy countries. Its purpose is less egocentric--to provide a better understanding, at the grass-roots level, between nations. The you-scratch-my-back policy which has developed instead makes the Peace Corps little more than a smaller edition of the Agency for International Development, whose avowed purpose is to provide economic development--such as dams and highways for nations in need. In fact, the Peace Corps this year began providing manpower for some of AID's smaller...
...with the Jamaican disc jockey's art of "toasting" (talking over the instrumental breaks in records) and a street kid's fondness for boasting, synthesizes the results with some distinctly contemporary audio technology and winds up with a sound that invites deejays at local dance palaces to "scratch" the surface. The deejays set the needle down in the groove of a record, turn the disc back and forth and get weird, repeated percussive effects, then jump quickly to another groove, another record, while some rap groups, called MCs, singsong over the music. The result, besides being danceable...
...assault-whittling away at frills, stretching out weapons purchases, skimping on maintenance money-will be as futile in the short run as they are wasteful in the long run. In a windowless office in the basement of the U.S. Capitol, where 18 congressional staffers known as the "bean counters" scratch for potential savings in the defense budget, a small sign on the wall sums up the dilemma: A BILLION DOLLARS JUST DOESN'T go AS FAR AS IT USED...
...Year of Living Dangerously makes no such claims, and therein lies its appeal. Weir's film doesn't provide all the answers. It only throws these problems out on the table, as if attempting to scratch somewhere beyond the too-easy conflicts of the political arena. The result is crude, very unpolished, but in its own way perhaps the most honest piece of work one can expect from Hollywood on the immense human problems of the Third World...
...example, if someone were to bring in a painting believed to be by Da Vinci, the Center's specialists would scratch off a sample of paint invisible to the naked eye. Workers then would examine the paint under a scanning electronic microscope in the astrophysics lab. ("It was bought for the moonrocks," Beale says, "but I don't think they use it much for that.") If the pigments and compounds used in the would-be Da Vinci do not match those from specimens that the master actually used, the painting is probably a fake...