Word: poppings
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...make up for lost time. Estonia has been a frontier state throughout its history, bumping up against Russia to the east and facing Finland across a narrow gulf. Since the three Baltic republics regained their independence in 1991 with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the tiny nation (pop. 1.35 million) has managed to put itself on the edge of far more than just geography. It was the first former Soviet republic to introduce its own currency, and the first European country to adopt a flat tax system, now widely copied in the rest of Eastern Europe. It has also...
...their prime - which extends from the debut of Flying Circus through Life of Brian 10 years later - the Pythons were lauded as doing for comedy in the '70s what the Beatles did for pop music in the '60s. They extended Britain's primacy of Cool through a decade that, in other respects, was pretty bleak. Not that a Silly Walk through Harrod's could lessen the likelihood of an IRA bomb, or a thought of the Parrot sketch could warm a body through a winter rendered heatless by the oil embargo. But the Pythons lightened the load. Whatever the real...
...Which is fine by me, since I'm as fond of saucy Broadway musicals as of silly-smart British TV comedy. If an impudent young satire like Monty Python and the Holy Grail should mellow into a fat and happy Spamalot, that's just the normal lifespan of transgressive pop culture: first to be dismissed as shocking, then to be accepted as trailblazing and finally to be cherished in dewy memory. The Idle show returns the Python troupe to their music-hall roots, and is a spiffy entertainment on its own - near as pleasing as it is pleased with itself...
...time for progress; a gross physical salute to the limitless possibilities bounded by our neighborhood, a place long known to be the center not only of the intellectual world but of almost all matters of any importance. Truly, this is no place for quaint, locally owned Mom-and-Pop shops, poisoning us with their backward ways and sometimes friendly service, adding what some call “character” to the Square...
Most of these products have been around all along, relegated to the bottom shelves of disappearing mom-and-pop shops or sold only regionally. But the Internet has made them newly available to a wider audience, and the affluence and vibrant identity of the post--World War II generation have inspired marketers to cater to its members' unflagging fondness for their youth. "The repackaging of nostalgia is nothing new," says Syracuse University popular-culture expert Robert Thompson, "but for the boomers, it has reached new heights of industrial sophistication. They grew up at a time when there was an explosion...