Word: uncommon
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Bless me, father, for I have sinned. It has been three months since I last attended Mass. I have instead spent Sunday mornings attending total-body workout classes at the gym, after which I have been attending brunch. In other words, no uncommon circumstances kept me from coming to church. I expect as penance a boatload of Hail Marys...
...feudal warriors battling for a football was selected as the official art poster for the 2006 World Cup. At first glance, it's easy to dismiss Tenmyouya's paintings as the latest mash-up of Asian culture and the language of fantasy cartoons. But like Matsui, Tenmyouya possesses uncommon talent with his brush, and an ability to satirize at will. In 2002-03's Neo Thousand-Armed Kannon series, he made a stroke-perfect representation of the Buddha of Compassion-but with those thousand arms carrying machine guns, pistols and daggers. Tenmyouya painted it in the wake of 9/11, when...
Rabbis are an uncommon sight in Indonesia, much less at a performance by the country's top rock star. Yet there they were, tapping along as Ahmad Dhani (also known as Dhani Dewa) sang his Warriors of Love at a recent conference in Bali on religious tolerance. Afterward, the rabbis-along with Islamic, Hindu and Catholic clerics-jostled for photos with the rock star...
...immigrant's story of hungry hearts and divided loyalties is delivered with uncommon honesty and understanding in Sarfraz Manzoor's Greetings from Bury Park. But what gives the memoir its special kick is that the Pakistani-born Briton, now 35, manages to stake out his own life, more hopeful than his parents', not by becoming an assimilated Englishman, nor by turning to radical Islam, but by becoming, of all things, a Springsteenite. In the songs of the Catholic Bruce Springsteen, from New Jersey, the keema aloo-loving boy in working-class England finds a way to grasp his parents' dreams...
...very communists he satirized. Citing documents in the former secret police archives, Newsweek Polska reported last month that Kapuscinski agreed to pass along information to Poland's spy agency between 1967 and 1972, probably as a condition for being allowed to travel abroad. Such deals were not uncommon for Polish journalists under the Soviet-backed regime, and in one document his handlers complain that he never gave them anything of value. With Kapuscinski unavailable for comment, the spying allegations will remain a cloud over his career. But he was acutely aware of his journalistic critics and, though he never confessed...