I got the distinct impression that "when you got it, you flaunt it". So when I arrived for my freshman year at Harvard -- the ultimate ivory tower and in a way itself a luxury brand -- I had some pretty clear expectations of how people would signal their status.
Newman says little about the level of practical, employable skills that should be imparted as part of a course of higher education, revealing his limitations as the ultimate ivory tower-dweller.
To me, his soaring spires, now the center of a state historic park, are the ultimate in backyard tower construction -- dances of caprice, anger, joy and nostalgia.
In 1990 he joined a commission set up by the Italian prime minister to stabilise Pisa's tower, the ultimate civil engineering challenge.
No person is interchangeable with another, but we all understand how interchangeable these Tuesday morning stories might have been if the timing of the attacks and the ultimate collapse of the towers had been different.
Then the local stability and overall buckling stability of the cooling tower were estimated, and the ultimate bearing capacities under different four-tower arrangements were compared considering geometric nonlinearity.
Distance has totally collapsed, and the twin towers are the ultimate metaphor for that collapse.
JEAN TINGUELY'S "Homage to New York" was billed as the ultimate homemade gadget -- a towering contraption composed of found junk, dismembered bicycles, dismantled musical instruments, glass bottles, a meteorological balloon and electric motors in questionable condition.
But somehow habit, custom, simply the electoral process, deigns that the series must run its full order -- unabated, unaborted and uninspired -- until we reach the towering denouement, the ultimate episode, the great Finale that is "The Next Four Years"... whomever they may belong to.
In a photograph, a bespectacled young man stands next to a tower of books, the ultimate bookworm.
