Word: slab
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...keep economic disparities out of our dining halls so that rich and poor can eat together as a community. But at the same time, the all-you-can-eat meal plan contributes to a culture cavalier about its leftovers. We are insulated against the realization that throwing a slab of meat or an uneaten salad onto the conveyor belt is qualitatively no different from idling your car instead of parking it, or running an air conditioner and heater at the same time...
...poverty-stricken salt marshes of rural Sind province. From a distance, the hulking mausoleum resembles a plasticine model of the Taj Mahal squeezed onto too small a foundation. Before Bhutto--who founded the Pakistan People's Party--was hanged, he had requested nothing more than a humble marble slab to mark his grave. But in Pakistani politics, image is everything. It's a lesson Benazir Bhutto learned at her father's knee. Hence her decision a dozen years ago to build him an ornate, 130-ft. (40 m) onion dome in the family's ancestral seat of Larkana...
...Bhutto's mausoleum is testimony more to his daughter's ambition than to his own self-image - before he was hanged, he had requested nothing more than a humble marble slab like those on the graves of his ancestors in the family plot. But, conscious of the power of image in Pakistani politics, Benazir opted instead for the 130-foot onion dome. Impressive as its facade may be, however, it conceals a shabby interior of chipped marble floors and peeling concrete pillars. The walls bear spray-painted messages in support of her estranged brother, Murtaza Bhutto, murdered by unknown assailants...
Zuma's opening party, in June of this year, typified Hong Kong at its worst. A laughably messianic invitation (issued as a slab of metal bearing the restaurant's name, but with no address or other details enclosed) summoned hundreds of what one would only describe in kindness as "VIPs" to the Landmark commercial complex to toast the new branch of Rainer Becker's Knightsbridge restaurant in a suffocating, five-deep-at-the-bar ordeal. How lovely, then, to return to Zuma some months later and realize that it is not a claustrophobic hellhole of anemic heirs and glassy-eyed...
...carries no precious jewels, just some dusty Ming vases (likely fakes) and cheap fish fossils scattered on the shelves. The bulky Wang, in a muscle T-shirt, glances around before beckoning me into one of two back rooms. From a secret closet behind a mirror, he pulls out a slab of rock which contains the profile of a half bird, half dinosaur, Confuciusornis sanctus, whose discovery in 1994 helped scientists develop the theory that birds evolved from dinosaurs...