Word: whose
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...their junkets, Chinese delegations carried elaborate shopping lists whose extravagance may far exceed the limits of the Chinese budget. Although China's international credit rating is excellent, the country has never dealt in the lofty sums now being discussed. The Chinese hope to finance their modernizations through development of oil exports, through joint ventures in which they pay off their debts in goods manufactured in foreign-built mainland factories, and through their immense human resources: manpower and discipline. One shadow over the New Long March, however, is doubt that the primitive Chinese economy can rouse itself to meet the price...
Like other geniuses, Henson is a sly fellow whose sound artistic instinct is to resist critical analysis. If you peel art away, layer after layer, what you have at the end is all peelings and no onion. For years Henson, who plays Kermit, insisted that the character was not a frog but "a froglike creature." Peel that, you peelers. Now he backtracks and says that "muppet" was simply a word that sounded good to him. The sound combination of puppet and marionette is merely an explanation that happens to sound logical...
Logic peeling aside, a Muppet is (most of the time but not always) a largish arm puppet, whose body contains the arm and whose head surrounds the hand of its operator. When the operator's thumb and fingers come together, the Muppet's mouth closes; when thumb and fingers separate, the mouth opens. If the Muppet's face is pliable, as Kirmit's is?he is not much more than a green felt sock that fits over a human hand, with a wide pink split for the mouth and what look like glued-on halves of Ping Pong balls...
...stars are the animals: Kermit, the pure and reasonable frog; the ineffable Miss Piggy, every circumferential inch a lady; Rowlf the Dog, a philosophical pianist; Fozzie Bear, the can't-stand-up comic; and The Great Gonzo, the magnificently inferior creature whose inventors insist, despite damning evidence, that he is not a turkey. Monsters are the remaining important category of beings: such enormities as Sweetums, who is about 9 ft. tall and covered with a three-day growth of brownish shag, and Thog, who is a good deal bigger and still growing, lend chaos to the goings...
...Jews for not shouting loud enough when they knew what was happening in Hitler's concentration camps; European Christians for standing idly by or keeping silent against the encircling terror. Even God is indicted. The tone echoes an ancient Jewish tradition, epitomized in the fiercely mystical Hasidic teachers whose stories Wiesel tells so well, men taking issue with the Master when the universe is out of joint. And Wiesel's eyes saw a universe contorted out of all proportion when he was confined in Auschwitz during the Holocaust...