Word: wasteland
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...good fun-it might be titled Sweeney Among the Mockingbirds. Parodist Purcell has great sport with Eliot's comparison shopping between languages and religions, his footnote-prone scholarship, his frequent obscurity ("Fiffles the refulgence of the Pliocene"). Typical of the parody is one passage from a psuedo-Wasteland...
...schoolteacher who liked to boast that he had taught William Lyon Mackenzie King, Canada's famed and durable (1921-48, except for five years) Liberal Prime Minster. When John was eight, father Diefenbaker took his family to a Saskatchewan crossroads where the northern prairies turn into a subarctic wasteland of muskeg, timber and lakes. There one day father Diefenbaker tied a red bandanna to the rim of a wagon wheel and, counting the turns of the wheel, measured off a 160-acre homestead. That spring he broke the virgin sod to the plow and put in his first crop...
...standards in the French Union." So said French Premier Maurice Bourges-Maunoury as he appointed the first Minister of the Sahara, Socialist Max Lejeune. The appointment gave a new fillip to excited talk in bars and bourses, where businessmen bubbled with highflying schemes for converting France's colonial wasteland into a new Ruhr and inexhaustible source of raw materials...
...Yukon in the 1898 Gold Rush was one Michael Stepovich, out of the Balkans by way of Oregon. He struck it fairly rich. Unlike most sourdoughs, he sank his profits into land investments instead of boozy sprees. Other Alaskans thought he was crazy to pay hard-earned money for wasteland around Fairbanks, but as the mining camp grew into a bustling city, Stepovich grew rich, became known all over the territory as "Wise Mike...
...parched country of northern Mexico's Chihuahua, a prairie wasteland fit for nothing but coyotes, ocelots, wolves and white-faced cattle, thrives a large oasis of green fields, spotless barns and blue-trimmed, gabled cottages. This is the colony of a stolid blond race, strangely contrasting with its dark neighbors-the home of the Mexican Mennonites...