Word: pyromaniac
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...sense, the Serb strongman was exactly where he most likes to be--at the pivot of an international crisis. He has built his career, as biographer Slavoljub Djukic puts it, by being both pyromaniac and fireman--igniting crises, then convincing people that only he can put the fires out. But the Kosovo conflagration he first lighted in 1989--by stripping away the rights of the ethnic Albanians who make up 90% of the province's population--is proving tricky to put out. Now he faces a perilous calculus: Is it riskier to cave in to Western demands or to suffer...
Personally, I don't like fire and never have. I don't like to suffer and cry when those around me do. I was never a pyromaniac as a young teenager...
...seniors of the late 1970's residing in leafy Vancouver, British Columbia, (which also happens to be Coupland's place of residence). The cast of characters is eerily reminiscent of a TV sitcom and conveniently created so as to pair-off nicely in the later chapters: meet, for example, pyromaniac slacker Hamilton and his Cover-Girl-to-be sweetheart Pam, "braniac" yearbook editor Wendy and quintessential geek Linus. Coupland gives quick, flashcard snapshots of their individual personalities by showing us their yearbook entries, for example...
...hard to say, precisely. Even after a day spent visiting the various tribes at the event--the pyromaniac camp, the rave camp, the wind-surfers camp, the rainbow camp--and then standing before the terrible heat of the very big fire of the neon-lit man, the answer is not any easier to articulate. Harvey, in the sly coyote logic of a true desert mystic, puts it this way: "If we didn't burn it, we wouldn't be able to burn it again next year...
...does it or not, it's just that he advocates having sex with little boys. It's . . . it's his mind." A Bronx Science student's mother, who wishes to be identified only as Kate, is more direct: "He's a pervert. It's like putting a pyromaniac to work in a gas station. I think at some point, with certain things, a line has to be drawn...