Word: taxied
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...gate many of the fugitives simply flagged down passing motorists and forced them out of their cars. One group of about 15 men stole three vehicles from a local farm, forcing a teen-age boy to explain the automatic controls of a car. Another tried to escape in a taxi. Police dragged four men, all of them either naked or clad only in underpants, out of the nearby River Lagan, where they had been submerged and were breathing through reeds. Another was marched away, blood dripping from a gunshot wound to his arm. The apprehended man grinned at Eyewitness Winston...
Outside the Ryoanji temple, the newest Japanese surfaces shine. The taxi drivers bustle, sweeping huge feather dusters over their cars, flicking specks from the bright metal. The ritual, a writer once remarked, makes them look like chambermaids in the first act of a French farce. But it is utterly Japanese, a set piece: the drivers handle their dusters like samurai. The scene is a sort of cartoon of the busy, fastidious superego that is supposed to preside in the Japanese psyche. The drivers even wear white gloves. There is probably not a dirty taxicab in Japan...
...Japanese have adopted many Chinese words, though the two languages remained entirely separate. Nor was Chinese the only foreign element. Portuguese missionaries later introduced pan (bread), and Dutch traders biiru (beer). Then came the tidal wave of English. Some of these Japanized words filled a practical need (takushi, taxi, or rajio, radio), while some were primarily fashionable (kohi-shoppu, coffee shop...
...typical night. The trouble is that People is not hooked up to the national computer reservation clearance, and its phone service is primitive. For each departure there are likely to be twice as many would-be passengers as seats. Those who lose out have the choice of taking a taxi to a nearby motel, which is not in the spirit of cut-rate fares, or sleeping on the marble floor of Newark airport's dreary North Terminal...
...throwaway behavioral observations. Sonny, for example, has a daughter (Kristen Vigard) who is a little compendium of spacy teen-age confusions; one minute she is watching porn tapes, the next she is trying to catch falling snowflakes on her tongue. Michael Leeson, who wrote scripts for the TV series Taxi, uses that show's mixture of urban gallantry and paranoia in his first feature. He has given Williams his best chance to vent his singular, hysterical style in a movie and provided Matthau, stooped and shuffling under the burden of his sanity, with his richest part in years...