Organized by Robert F. Fitzpatrick, then president of CalArts, the festival took advantage of local resources — orchestras, dance and theater companies, museums and galleries — but most of that paled next to the extraordinary imports, especially from Europe and Asia.
Since his arrival in Moscow as the United States ambassador, he has engaged in frequent back-and-forth sniping with the Russian Foreign Ministry on matters of extraordinary international import like missile defense and the uprising in Syria all within the highly undiplomatic and public arena of the Internet, mostly on Twitter.
Before the neighborhood was razed by fire, it was the 17th-century equivalent of New York's modern Diamond District: a hub of commerce, creativity and craftsmanship fueled by an influx of immigrant artisans working with extraordinary gem materials imported from around the globe.
Last year Britain imported an extraordinary 4bn bananas from some of the poorest parts of the world.
But economists cautioned that October might be an exception caused by the extraordinary drop in oil imports.
As Janet Gleeson recounts in her eminently readable popular history "The Arcanum: The Extraordinary True Story," the importing of Chinese porcelain to Europe in the mid-16th century started a fad akin to tulip mania.
These dishes are nothing extraordinary, apart from some imported beef.
It's a light colored group of extraordinary wealth that dines on imported steaks and French wines, looking down on the writhing, disorderly poor black masses of Port Au Prince.
Cupping is also a way of pinpointing where in the production or importing chain even the most extraordinary coffees can be damaged.
For the safety of the consumer, American pharmaceutical companies insist, extraordinary precautions must be taken before drugs can be imported from Canada (heaven knows what the Canadians, a devil-may-care sort of people, put into those pills).
