Word: shrine
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...remedy and announces: "Now I'm ready for anything." One private eye uses a drugstore as rendezvous-a drugstore whose shelves are conspicuously filled with the sponsor's patent medicines. In another samurai episode, the hero vanquished a batch of evildoers, then warily approached a wayside shrine whence came a mysterious breeze; he jerked the shrine door open to discover an air-conditioning unit and a pretty girl, who intoned: "It's Nippon Electric's latest model...
...water, Bernadette-imprinted soap for washing in it. Other "water" items: perfume, throat lozenges, cakes and candy advertised as "made from water blessed by the Holy Father." One ad agency is talking of hiring an airplane to skywrite ads for its clients' products directly above the shrine...
...Collusion. But outside the shrine's gates, the bishop has no power. "He is not master of the situation," admitted Father Emile Gabel, secretary of Lourdes International Information Center, and added that despite constant allegations in the anticlerical press that the church gets a rake-off from Lourdes merchants, "there is absolutely no collusion between the bishop and the city." (The church's only income from the shrine: $500,000 yearly from Grotto collection boxes and sale of religious books, all used to maintain the buildings.) As for the pious objects, "we cannot suppress bad taste," said Father...
Lourdes hucksters gave no sign that they saw any such error. In this centennial year, pilgrims are expected to spend more than $190 million on pious objects. Even the smallest shop near the shrine is estimated to be worth almost $200,000 to its owner. Lourdes has now even put hinges on its street signs to reroute traffic through a different area of town every two weeks so as to give each merchant an equal crack at the pilgrims...
...highway crew smashed the figures into the roadbed, but their foreman told the story at the sake house that night. Soon a delegate of National Museum curators rushed to the spot-too late. Lost: another priceless trove of Haniwa sculpture, the funerary pottery in the form of warriors, horses, shrine maidens, even ducks, monkeys and chickens found in burial mounds of the 3rd to 7th centuries...