Word: soured
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Though pure fiction, the story of Old Zhao is circulating widely on the Chinese Internet these days, with plenty of rueful comments trailing in its wake. It reflects a sour undercurrent running beneath the blare of Olympic triumphalism that reached a crescendo in the days before the Aug. 8 opening ceremony. With the capital socked in for days by a gray haze, there was a literal and metaphorical pall hanging over what Beijing has long hoped would be a moment of glory marking the country's re-emergence, after years of darkness and irrelevance, as a world power...
...China's superhuman efforts to put its best foot forward and put on a good show could, in the end, prove to be as harmful to the Olympic spirit as any sour-faced street protest. Xu Guoqi, author of Olympic Dreams: China and Sports, 1895-2008 and a history professor at Kalamazoo College in the U.S., says that Beijing's overzealous approach to security has limited the chances for spontaneous celebrations. Even Chinese citizens are forbidden to wear nationalistic T shirts into sporting events. "Beijing is being overcautious," says Xu. "I guess that's in order to host a safe...
Even when we landed in Beijing, no one at the airport seemed to pay much attention to the Thai weightlifters. They should have stood out in the crowd, these well-muscled men and women hefting giant boxes of tom yum (hot and sour) instant noodles off the baggage carousel. (I guess we now know the secret ingredient to their success.) But as they pushed their luggage carts full of noodles past the airport crowds, no one came up for an autograph or asked them to pose for a picture. Dashiell, though, seemed to remember the man who retrieved his duckie...
Ralph Fiennes, head nearly shaved, thin frame draped in mud-brown haberdashery, stands in an implied graveyard and works his mouth into a sour scowl as he says he doesn't mind the smell of corpses. "A trifle on the sweet side perhaps, a trifle heady, but how infinitely preferable to what the living emit, their feet, teeth, armpits, arses, sticky foreskins and frustrated ovules." Fiennes enumerates these body parts with slow precision, and in a tone of crescendoing disgust. It might be a litany of curses, a bill of criminal charges brought against a species about to be condemned...
...people who founded this country knew a great and sour truth: power turns everybody to crap. I'm relying on the wisdom of the founders to guide...