Word: sisal
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Personally, I prefer one-inch sisal for the job. You get too many blisters on your hands from nylon...
That unsolicited testimonial comes from Rhodesia's retired hangman, Edward ("The Dropper") Milton, and it is in praise of the fiber extracted from a cactus-like plant that grows mostly in Africa and Latin America. Not everyone, however, feels the same affection for sisal. Though it is still used in rope, twine, potato sacks and carpets, sisal is being steadily replaced by nylon and other synthetics. Its last bastion is agricultural twine, which now accounts for 75% of world sisal production...
Women sit by great kettles of food, or display brightly-colored cloths, or guard piles of oranges, bananas, and mangoes. Throngs of people crowd the markets and mill in the little shops where shoes, mahogany products, straw hats, sisal baskets, and old French grammar books are sold. There is movement and excitement in the streets--but the energy has no focus, it leads nowhere...
...West Germany's Heinz Mack, 36, one of the Group Zero, abandoned painted abstractions in 1953 to study philosophy and logic for three years at the University of Cologne. Artistic illumination came to him in 1959, when accidentally, he stepped on a piece of aluminum foil on a sisal rug, was delighted with the light reflections on its newly embossed surface. Today he uses plastics, spotlights, rotors, polished aluminum foil and nubbled glass to recapture this "amazing, profoundly changing" phenomenon, says that "to me, light plays the same part that color used to play for painters...
...Tanzania, the Asians were reeling from President Nyerere's rapid-fire nationalization of nearly 30 companies. Out of eight food-processing concerns taken over by the government, all but one were owned by Asians. Other Asians had millions on deposit in banks seized by Nyerere. Owners of lucrative sisal plantations were resigned to an expected takeover of their lands. Already more than 500 Asians have been ordered to leave Tanzania for failing to take out residence permits. Asians have been cursed, reviled and threatened during frenzied street demonstrations in Dar es Salaam by emerald-shirted black youths dubbed...