In "Immigrant Voyage," he tells how refugees from D.P. camps after World War II kept their "thumbs hooked down hard under belts / to repress gesticulation".
I'd be pumped up enough to really run the ball up there, and I'm not giving any secrets away by saying that McGwire doesn't handle the hard stuff belt-high or up a little bit.
As you listen to Linda Eder sock out show tunes in perfect pitch with a voice that only gains in substance the harder she belts, she seems the personification of the pop diva as vocal athlete.
With a hard leather belt taking the weepy out of a broderie anglaise skirt, and knickers wrested from the wee ring bearer's category, Ms. Philo sent out a sophisticated collection that showed, in its frothy cutout blouses and sandals jangling with charms, how to marry the kinky with the elegant.
The collection had a punk insolence, mainly for cummerbunds coated in what looked like metal dress snaps, but the overused reference didn't do justice to Ms. Demeulemeester's great sense of proportion (a metal-embroidered girdle worn low on the hips of a taupe jersey dress) or the boss elegance of a black wrap top worn with a hard leather belt and soft, low-riding pants.
Maybe he was selling his 109-room mansion, all those hard-earned belts and his bloodied gloves and robes.
The layered structure makes the ball feel soft when hit with a slower swing and hard when belted at higher velocities.
Now, Kreuzberg can add another notch in its hard-scrabble belt with the October unveiling of the community-oriented Markthalle Neun.
That will be about as attractive to hard-pressed, belt-tightening Europeans as the prospect of handing their jobs to those Tunisians on Lampedusa.
A competent singer with a tough, metallic delivery and uninventive phrasing, Miss Carr belongs to the Shirley Bassey school of pop singing, which holds that the harder you belt the more you express.
