Word: maidening
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...Dash dropped his yellow duckie, a powerfully built young man in Row 57 obligingly returned it. Another man played peekaboo, his forearms bulging as his hands uncovered his grinning face. Then, a female traveler who - how shall I put this? - was built rather more solidly than the average Thai maiden, gave my son a friendly wink. I began to suspect something. I looked at one of the men and raised my arms, miming a barbell ascending skyward. He nodded, cheerfully. Dashiell's in-flight babysitters, it turned out, were none other than the Thai Olympic weightlifting team...
...brutality of his rule, in the most unexpected place - the compound of the Iraqi sports ministry. In one corner of a sprawling complex of offices and official residences, behind walls emblazoned with the universal symbol of the Olympic Games, was that most medieval of torture devices: an iron maiden...
...iron maiden confirmed some of the ghastly stories I'd heard about Uday's treatment of Iraqi sportsmen, especially the national soccer team. When they lost a game, they routinely received beatings and an imaginative range of punishments - like being made to kick concrete balls, or forced to run shoeless over shards of glass. Later, I would meet a coach who had spent two terrifying hours in the iron maiden - his torso was riddled with scars from the spikes...
...Iraq is hardly the only country where politicians meddle with sport. The Games are, after all, being held in China! For another, if the IOC was perfectly happy to let Iraq participate in previous Games when Uday was running Iraq sports. Perhaps locking a football player in an iron maiden doesn't qualify under the IOC's definition of "political interference," but that's a distinction that will be lost on most Iraqis...
...House--and HGTV's Sleep On It, which has essentially the same premise--points up the shift in power between buyers and sellers. During the housing boom, it was the buyers who were afraid they might have to date (i.e., rent) forever. Your house was a coy Victorian maiden with eager suitors queuing up in the parlor. Now it's Lily Bart in The House of Mirth, facing squalor and destitution should it fail to find a suitable match. It's a contestant on The Bachelor, competing with a crowd of others and pining for a private date...