Word: shrapnel
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Throughout the lighthearted skits, one-liners fly like shrapnel -- about Reagan's forgetfulness, loose use of facts, light working schedule ("from 9 to 12, from Monday clear to Wednesday") and reliance on pop-culture symbolism ("an idyllic land of tax breaks and lots of big-grossing summer movies"). The title number depicts Reagan as a shameless manipulator of images in defiance of content: he seeks black support for his policies toward South Africa by chanting in the style of rap music and attempting an arthritic version of Michael Jackson's moon walk...
Still, a long mythic fiesta between two explosions may not be a bad way to have a life. The first explosion came in Fossalta di Piave in northeastern Italy at midnight on July 8, 1918. A shell from an Austrian trench mortar punctured Hemingway with 200-odd pieces of shrapnel. The wounds validated his manhood, which they had very nearly destroyed. The second explosion came 25 years ago this summer. Early one morning in Ketchum, Idaho, Hemingway (suffering from diabetes, nephritis, alcoholism, severe depression, & hepatitis, hypertension, impotence and paranoid delusions, his memory all but ruined by electroshock treatments) slid...
...such totems of futurist affection as a 1911 Bleriot monoplane and a World War I Spad hanging from the cortile roof, and a vintage Bugatti by the canal entrance, to remind one of Marinetti's belligerent and much quoted dictum that "a roaring motorcar that seems to run ( on shrapnel is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace...
...movie warrior, he is a TV cartoon character, he is a plastic doll, he is a music-video creature and now, in candy racks all over America, he is chewing gum--Rambo black flak, jagged, black raspberry bits packed in foil pouches and meant to resemble shrapnel...
Still, East Germans will not have an easy time escaping to the West. Although East Berlin ordered the removal of fence-mounted shrapnel mines and automatic self-firing devices last year, other obstacles remain. Officials raised the electrified metal fences by more than one-third, to 9.8 feet, installed sensitive alarm devices and deployed a record 1,429 German Shepherds along the border. So far, those measures have proved successful. Only 30 people escaped in 1985, down from 54 a year earlier...