Word: carpet
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Calm and seemingly cool in 90° heat, the young woman walked down the red carpet at Pnompenh's Pochentong Airport, escorted by Cambodia's Prince Norodom Sihanouk, all smiles and a torrent of French. An exotically garbed palace guard held a giant green parasol over their heads to screen them from the afternoon sun, and 200 schoolgirls in bright green sampots, the traditional skirts, sprinkled her path with fragrant rose and jasmine petals, which they carried in silver bowls-the Buddhist way, explained Sihanouk, of honoring very special guests...
...Carpet. Some pilots, of course, do not get back. So far, the U.S. has lost 689 planes. Their pilots either "buy the farm" (get killed) or end up at "the Hanoi Hilton" (get captured). The three out of four who do get back and manage to complete 100 missions win membership in an elite club that now numbers in the hundreds. When a pilot hits the magic mark, his fellow pilots and flight mechanics roll out the red carpet for his return, give him a rousing, horn-honking parade of fire trucks and maintenance vehicles. In turn, he provides...
...impassioned belief in the self-revealing, mind-expanding powers of potent weeds and seeds and chemical compounds known to man since prehistory but wholly alien to the rationale of Western society. Unlike other accepted stimuli, from nicotine to liquor, the hallucinogens promise those who take the "trip" a magic-carpet escape from reality in which perceptions are heightened, senses distorted, and the imagination permanently bedazzled with visions of Ideological verity...
Died. Air Marshal Lord Tedder, 76, Eisenhower's Deputy Supreme Allied Commander from 1943 to 1945, a brilliant R.A.F. tactician who as Middle East air commander in 1941 devised the concept of "carpet bombing," using hundreds of planes literally to blow a path for ground troops through Nazi minefields and fortifications, later played a major role in planning and carrying out the immensely complex invasion of Europe, with primary responsibility for making certain that land and sea forces had the fullest possible air cover; of Parkinson's disease; in Banstead, England...
...himself as a television panelist. Frayn's greatest comic invention is to take a horde of thirsty European journalists on a boondoggling press junket to the Near East. At each unlikely way station toward a destination never reached, they consume more and more tree booze, "compliments of Magic Carpet." By the time of the denouement in Ljubljana, ?5,000 worth of liquid hospitality has been consumed. While they drink, Frayn mocks but does not eviscerate; the chroniclers of a society, he seems to be saying, mirror the society itself...