Word: uselessness
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...other words of advice are in order. Leave your preconceptions at home; pack instead medical supplies for most intestinal contingencies (don't drink the water, peel all the fruit) and a healthy tolerance for inconvenience (no toilet paper or light bulbs). Credit cards and traveler's checks are useless; leave home without them. Bring cash but not bundles. The maximum value of goods purchased to take home cannot exceed $100, and there is little to buy. Viet Nam is a banquet primarily for the mind, richly sauteed in historical resonances. And despite those resonances, the reception is remarkably warm...
...lamentable truth is that while at Harvard I have learned nothing except a seemingly useless and unconnected series of facts that can be best described as trivia. And, despite the fact that someday you, too, will have a Harvard diploma, the truth is the same in your case...
...when immigration officials, accompanied by a Japanese diplomat, stopped them. A South Korean request for Tokyo to check travel documents had revealed that the woman held a fake passport. She would have to return to Japan. Asked if he wanted to proceed to Rome, her companion said, "It is useless to travel alone." As a guard watched over them in the Bahrain airport, the woman took out a pack of Marlboros. Removing a glass capsule, the couple consumed an unknown substance and slumped forward. Rushed to a hospital, the man was pronounced dead. The woman survived but refused to talk...
Even when T.M.U. teaches a "dead and completely useless language," as it does in Roman Studies 25, it does so in a way that will assist the modern student. Thus, the matriculator at T.M.U. learns how to say travellers checks in Latin and ask, "Ubi est Americanus Expressus...
...ingenious group portrait shows his subjects linked by a kinship of misery. Colleagues praised Roethke's hectic, incandescent verse and gossiped about his violent breakdowns. He described his electroshock therapy in rhyme: "Swift's servant beat him./ Now they use/ A current flowing/ From a fuse." The jolts were useless. He died of a sudden heart attack at 55. Jarrell was not content to be the best poetry reviewer of his time, says Meyers, "he had to be a great, perhaps the greatest poet -- or he was nothing." It was during one dark time that the writer, 51, fell under...