Word: silken
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...feast begins in late April or May, when the caterpillars first emerge from their eggs. As they finish off one tree, they swing easily to another on silken threads they secrete. Their vagabond life accounts for the name gypsy. Millions can infest a small wooded patch. As they crunch, dropping excrement and half-eaten leaves, they sound like steady rain. Some homeowners complain that the noise actually keeps them awake. The caterpillars crawl up walls, spread over driveways, drop into plates and glasses at backyard barbecues. Last month Massachusetts officials got a call from a badly flustered woman. So many...
...into high art. His use of curves and filigrees had the delicacy and tensile strength of Victorian wrought iron, but his subjects-fauns, satyrs, naked slaves-earned him a reputation of fearful decadence. Even in the prurient "yellow nineties," when young men dragged live lobsters down Pall Mall on silken leashes, Beardsley was singled out. "A monstrous orchid," Oscar Wilde proclaimed him, a judgment unchallenged until...
...Peace Café turn right at the Four Unities Hair Salon, pass the East Wind Movie Theater and head down Goldfish Alley. Before it was shuttered in the late 1970s, the café attracted some of Peking's most stylish youth, like New Nation Li, "attired in silken shirt and a well-tailored, gray Western suit with tight-fitting bell-bottom pants and pointed black shoes." Or Benefit-the-People Wang, by day a soldier in the People's Liberation Army, by night an exponent of the funky layered look. "From the chin up he looks like...
...poor and frustrated in a region overripe with lust and repression: "What I had once seen as the condition of being female, I now saw as female and Southern. I perceived my mother, grandmothers, sister, daughters-and all the women whose roots I shared-as netted in one mutual silken bondage. Together, we were trapped in a morass of Spanish moss, Bible Belt guilt, and the pressures of a patriarchy stronger than in any other part of the country...
...conducted London's Hotel Metropole Orchestra and his own Tipica Orchestra in concerts, BBC broadcasts and on records in the 1920s, '30s and '40s, and later became music director for Playwright Noel Coward, Mantovani was little known outside of Britain until 1951, when he created his silken "shimmering strings" effects and recorded the waltz Charmaine. The recording, monomaniacally promoted by a Cleveland disc jockey, triggered a Mantovani craze that turned his American concerts into sellout affairs and seven albums into gold (more than half a million of each were sold). Said the purveyor of Greensleeves, Misty...