Word: waxing
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Charms and Nail-Parings. Hansen spells out the point: "If you believe in witchcraft and you discover that someone has been melting your wax image over a slow fire or muttering charms over your nail-parings, the probability is that you will get extremely sick. To be sure, your symptoms will be psychosomatic rather than organic. But the fact that they are obviously not organic will make them only more terrible, since they will seem the result of malefic and demonic power...
...setting for a good Saturday matinee must be carefully selected. The theater should be old, cavernous and dirty, with lots of balcony railing to prop sneakers on. The popcorn butter should be on the congealed side, and the popcorn itself sold in hard wax containers, which, when stomped, produce a report like an 18th century cannon. The candy counter should be well stocked with small, hard sweets that can be hurled at antagonists below...
...first 26 hours, a steady parade of vandals had removed the battery, radiator, air cleaner, radio antenna, windshield wipers, right-hand-side chrome strip, hubcaps, a set of jumper cables, a gas can, a can of car wax, and the left rear tire (the other tires were too worn to be interesting). Nine hours later, random destruction began when two laughing teen-agers tore off the rearview mirror and began throwing it at the headlights and front windshield...
...renders his past absurd in an attempt to lessen its painful grip on him. He keens the familiar tale of the strongwilled, overattentive mother and the castrated father. He tells how his mother fondled him during toilet training, how she eroticized the insides of his ears while removing the wax, and how she forced him to eat at knife point. Portnoy is continuingly being floored by the fact that she could be so unconscious of the unconscious...
...more advanced were the later Quimbaya Indians of Colombia, who discovered how to make alloys of gold and copper and also mastered the sophisticated "lost-wax" technique of casting. First, the Indians made a model of the sculpture in beeswax or resin and covered it with a powdered charcoal and then a thick layer of clay. Next, they applied heat, melting the wax so that it ran out a channel in the hardened clay impression. They then used the impression as a breakable mold, pouring the molten gold in through the channel in the clay. It is the same method...