The characters in "The Fall of the American Empire" are foils for the filmmaker's anxieties about modern life, here having mostly to do with the hypocrisy of the financial and legal worlds, as well as his longtime bete noire, the Canadian health bureaucracy: One petty criminal winds up in a hospital room that seems to be a jury-rigged broom closet.

The bottom line, for me, is how magically even my jury-rigged method collapses the distance between my thoughts and the computer.

Throngs of people continued to wait on the bridge border crossing, where on Saturday morning many pressed for limited opportunities to plead their case to immigration officials, while many others opted to cross the river illegally, either on jury-rigged rafts or by swimming.

Electricity in these converted homes is jury-rigged , and most residents do not have running water.

Too small and generally too healthy to attract investor interest, children traditionally have been treated with jury-rigged adult devices (many of which are used off-label).

Many of those forced to flee are -- like Orila -- crammed into jury-rigged evacuation centers, where up to 80 people live in a classroom meant for 20 students, with no access to a proper toilet.

Fermi was charged with creating the chain reaction needed to power such a bomb; he did the work in a jury-rigged laboratory under Stagg Field at the University of Chicago.

There is no longer a need to rely on a sample gown that's jury-rigged to fit your body," says Kevin Harrington, whose family's business has long-standing connections to the bridal industry.

On their own, computer experts have been experimenting with jury-rigged homemade do-it-yourself (DIY) systems.

Fine in small doses, after a while these discursive adjuncts describing precisely what the things are and just how they were created--here by way of explanatory texts integrated into the show's checklist and on wall labels--can start to feel like getting buttonholed at the family reunion by a crazy uncle who wants to explain how he's jury-rigged his lawn mower to barbecue chicken.

The vehicles made a motley fleet: sport utility vehicles, jeeps, buses, motorcycles and light trucks with jury-rigged heavy machine gun mounts in the back.