Word: shroud
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Advice columns hide behind a shroud of mundanity. Both Dear Abby's small size relative to hard-news articles and its usual oscillation between the trivial and the melodramatic disguises the column's deeper philosophical significance. Every installment is more than a mere detailing of a few individuals' kvetches about an uncaring world; rather, each day's column forms a single vignette within the sweep of a surreal, Gogolesque epic about human weakness. And so the decades-long history of Dear Abby becomes a never-ending morality play...
...people of the Third World yearn for such products with a kind of religious ardor. Show a developing Polaroid picture to a man in a remote forest of Africa or South America. The developing image (his own, perhaps) seems to him more astonishing and supernatural than the Shroud of Turin...
...Havana cost as much and earned far less. The reason Bonfire was a goner from the git-go is that it was based on the one '80s novel every media savant had read and, mentally, already filmed. Even a reverent adaptation would have been fitted with an Armani shroud...
BILLY BATHGATE. Over budget and over schedule, with rumors of rancor soiling its production, Robert Benton's movie of the E.L. Doctorow novel arrives in a shroud of doom. Well, surprise! There's rare grace and gravity in the tale of a Bronx kid (Loren Dean, a find) who hitches his hopes to the falling star of gangster Dutch Schultz (Dustin Hoffman, again splendid). Forget the Cassandras. Go see a good movie...
These finer particles remained suspended, drifting into a globe-enveloping shroud that blocked sunlight for months before blanketing the earth in a layer of dust. In the cold and dark, photosynthesis ceased, plants and animals died, and entire species, including the dinosaurs, perished...