The public perception of Qwest could change quickly from pugnacious scrapper to hopeless leper.

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But as everyone knows all too well, today's darling can easily become tomorrow's leper.

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Farther up the coast, the insular island of Molokai, famous for its leper colony, hovers close offshore.

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In "The Leper's Companion, " a nameless narrator suffers a nameless loss so strong that it shocks her out of time.

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Far from a leper, to observe him throughout the weekend was to see Crane regularly approached by attendees with high praise.

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We see the leper only darkly: his blackened skin, its clammy sheen.

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If a leper wanted to approach a town, he had to do so at night and ring a bell to warn people of his presence.

NEWYORKER: Rich Man, Poor Man

Much is made of the power play between the King of Jerusalem (a leper in a metal mask), his exotic and plainly loopy sister (Eva Green), his military adviser (Jeremy Irons), and a brace of leering villains (Marton Csokas and Brendan Gleeson).

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But a nicely treated leper.

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Along with millions of other out-of-date and unsecured PCs strung together by the Internet--what Corman calls "the leper colony"--those machines represent a combined mass of computing power responsible for most of the Net's spam e-mails, much of its click fraud, and the vicious "denial of service" attacks that can knock sites offline and even destroy online businesses altogether.

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