Word: tortuous
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...plus stone steps, the ancient Nabataeans have prepared a wondrous reward. The decorative fa?ade, carved into a solid chunk of yellow sandstone in the 3rd century B.C., rises 45 meters above the ground. If the hike through rock canyons and past stunning vistas is a little tortuous, a small, Bedouin-run caf? offering cold drinks and chairs awaits at the top. For those with extra energy and a taste for heights, it is possible to scramble up the back of the fa?ade to the stone roof where you can perch with your feet hanging into the void...
...schools in the province's capital, Tarin Kowt, are to be renovated, as well as a small hospital in the dusty district where the raid went wrong. Also, a 50-mile road linking Tarin Kowt with the southern city of Kandahar will be built, reducing the journey from a tortuous five hours to less than 60 minutes. Aid to the area will also include completion of a large bridge spanning one of Uruzgan province's major rivers, a project begun by the Taliban regime but which today is marked only by a parade of concrete pylons across the riverbed. Most...
...make the movie you want to make, you need time. But that's the hardest thing to find when you're a filmmaker." Scorsese was putting "Voyage" together in 1998-99, when he was finally ramping up his long-deferred "Gangs of New York." In light of the tortured, tortuous process of that film's production, his comment sounds like a cry de profundis...
Blue-ribbon presidential commissions fall into two very different personality groups. Type A commissions are made up of reasonable people who disagree about some complicated problem and then struggle to reach consensus. These folks spend months in tortuous public hearings, draft carefully hedged reports, and often wind up utterly deadlocked. Type B panels avoid that outcome by being rigged from the start--stacked with people who already agree on What Is to Be Done yet still go through the motions of assessing the problem. Their final reports are clear and sweeping but usually dead on arrival, because all the opponents...
...tortuous and subjective process-and it's precisely what federal legislators now need to go through, on the grandest of all possible scales, as they meet to hammer out the differences between the education bills recently passed by the House and Senate. While the Bush administration is already congratulating itself for pushing through a "monumental achievement with bipartisan support," the real work has yet to be done. All that's guaranteed right now is that every child in America will be tested every year in grades 3 through 8 in math and reading. But such tests will mean nothing (except...