Word: spasms
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...spasm of reforming zeal, the Federal Highway Administration in 1976 announced that it was thinking of changing all signs on the nation's interstates from miles to kilometers. After receiving nearly 5,000 letters of protest, the FHA quickly abandoned the scheme...
...places for moral improvement, but that it took so long for the U.S. to recognize and confess the folly. The outlook always should have been grim. Riots have beset American prisons from the beginning. But those manifest failures along the way were only specifically disappointing, not generally disillusioning. A spasm of violence at a particular prison, epidemic madness at another, each was explained away as a technical error: the cellblock configuration was wrong, the recreation policy too lenient. One who saw through to the inherent failure was Alexis de Tocqueville, whose famous 1831 tour of the U.S. was, first...
...Egypt has a sharply different role: now it is assumed not to be a reliable Soviet client state but, in alliance with Saudi Arabia, a force that extinguishes Libyan extremism, helps to impose moderation on the Israelis and thus stabilizes the Middle East. Otherwise, our next spasm of global bloodshed remains much as imagined four years ago in The Third World War: August 1985 by retired British General Sir John Hackett, 71, and his military associates. So does the authors' message: civilian blathering about disarmament is infantile, and the West's only hope is to trust its stalwart...
...Sound. "New Orleans music is Afro-Caribbean, Afro-Cuban and Mardi Gras Indian. Combine that with natural street rhythms like Bo Diddley or the hambone little spasm bands that play boxes and garbage-can covers in the streets and you have a piece of the thing. Add parade drums to that and you have a little more. The Mardi Gras Indians incorporated all this rhythmically. On Mardi Gras day the Indians would wear costumes-a lot of feathers-and come out in the morning to greet the sunrise and all move toward the center of the city. As they went...
...love) display little charm, conviction or screen presence. But the intensity of Tesich's obsessions can ennoble his clichés about love of family, friends and country. And Penn, a poet of domestic sexual tension, stages illuminating vignettes to express what the script or actors cannot: a spasm of violence at Danilo's dinner table; the elegant tangle of lovers on a summer beach, with a third figure watching anxiously; a final campfire rendezvous full of elegy and accommodation. By this time the film has almost stitched itself back together, like the tattered American flag that Penn...