Word: virginal
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...phone rings. You are on vacation in the Virgin Islands. You have been dreaming about the fishing for the better part of two months, and you are about to head out to chase the Christmastime bonefish running offshore and to spend a day on the water, with the sun leaching six months of Washington baloney from your brain. The phone rings, and because you are Secretary of the Treasury, you answer. "This is the Treasury operator," says the voice. "Please stand by for a conference call...
...Elizabeth, which traces the early bumps of the title character's Golden Age reign, Fiennes takes a backseat to the Virgin Queen, Cate Blanchett. Again, Fiennes the philanderer takes on the guise of a lovesick puppy who sacrifices everything for his one true thing. His passionate declarations of loyalty play off nicely against the sweet princess turned ice queen. The cinematographic cop-outs distract from the fluidity of the film, as does the production design, which uses color and shadow to beat the symbolic dead horse. That's the curse of the artsy indie, I guess. The film does have...
...Hadidi, says that in 80% of the cases in which he conducts a hymenal exam, which is routine in Jordan when a girl has gone missing, the same girl will be returned to him soon after as a corpse, even if she proved to be a virgin. "Once the story is out in the community," says Asma Khader, a lawyer and feminist, "they have to kill." Forbidden sex isn't always the issue. Marrying or divorcing against the family's wishes can also provoke murder...
Then there is the subject matter that these artists selected: there seems to be an overriding emphasis on the biblical and the classical. Brutus's wife, Portia, is here, swallowing her coals. Charming nymphs and satyrs, Psyche and Cupid, and Juno and Bacchus are portrayed next to angels, the Virgin, and Adam and Eve. But there are also some peasants, shepherds, portraits of anonymous females and beautiful studies of hands and nudes. With a little chalk and ink, the artists examined everything from the silly to the sacred...
...Hillary for its own cues. If that view was surpassingly cynical, it had its own history. Back in January, as Clinton was preparing for his deposition in the Paula Jones case, the cameras had "caught" him and Hillary in a private moment, dancing on the beach in the Virgin Islands. As the year unfolded, casual friends of the Clintons noticed something a little creepy in the occasional offhand remark from the First Couple--as in "Buddy jumped in bed with us this morning"--whose only purpose seemed to be to signal the connubial geography. Privacy, it seemed, could be auctioned...