Word: swollenness
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...refuse, piled in fantastic configurations, looked like some strange, fetid form of sculpture. For 18 days, while municipal garbage collectors remained on strike, the waste mounted to an estimated 20,000 tons. Clouds of flies hovered everywhere; rats scurried from their rancid treasure. Plastic trash bags became toxic balloons, swollen tight by noxious fumes from the detritus inside. "Trash entrepreneurs," driving around in vans, carted bags away for 75 cents each. Along with their luggage, residents even began taking their rubbish with them as they left for vacations in the Poconos or for trips to relatives in nearby New Jersey...
While benefiting thousands of people, these policies have led to drastically scarce bed space for mental patients, swollen numbers of disturbed homeless people roaming the streets of America's cities, and forbidding legal constraints against forced institutionalization. In Onalaska, Wis., last year, a 30-year-old man shot to death a priest, a lay minister and a church custodian during a mass. He had been released from a Michigan mental-health institution, where he had been committed after several prior assaults. But Wisconsin's laws and those of many other states would not allow him to be involuntarily committed...
...strong yen is slowing the pace of Japanese exports, but Tokyo is still feeling the pressure to shrink its swollen foreign trade surplus. Last week Japanese Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone took new steps--or perhaps half steps--to meet those international pressures by vowing to change the habits of his country's 120 million thrifty citizens. On the eve of a weekend visit to Camp David to discuss the seven-nation annual economic summit that Japan will host in May, Nakasone accepted a report by a Cabinet advisory committee that outlined ways to wean the Japanese away from an export...
...that stew of American vanguard kitsch, the 1985 Whitney Biennial, was a large painting by a 36-year-old artist named Terry Winters. Done in a thick, ocherous impasto, which produced a paint surface that looked both lavish and summarily abbreviated, the image suggested (of all unlikely things) mushrooms: swollen glands like morels, crinkled and cellular, standing up in ranks like an array of mysterious brown balloons. It was odd to find any painting in such a show that addressed itself--however obliquely or eccentrically--to nature. But its relation to nature did not look simple. The painting...
Remember those home movies your crazy uncle would show at big family events? Everyone would gather round the screen to laugh at Aunt Bertha's swollen thighs, smirk at cousin Damien's antics, and smile at Grandma Smith's sweet girlishness as she shied from the camera's probing lens. Everyone was thrilled and secretly proud and yet vaguely terrified to see themselves caught and fixed on screen...