Word: absurdities
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...What Rules of the Game did for French comedy, the films of Preston Sturges did for American comedies of the 1930s and 40s. Though he is an explicitly non-political director Sturges's comedies constantly explode the key assumptions of American ideology. To explore their internal contradictions, they use absurd resolutions to undercut both their standard form and premises. He thus stands in direct contrast with Hollywood comedy directors, especially Frank Capra, whose work always ended up uncritically reaffirming the nostrums of American ideology. Though Sturges's other films, such as The Great McGinty, The Palm Beach Story, and Christmas...
...great majority of economists," writes Schumacher, "are still pursuing the absurd ideal of making their 'science' as scientific and precise as physics, as if there were no qualitative difference between mindless atoms and men made in the image of God." Through the economist's theoretical lens, we are all merely so many atoms, with greed as our organizing principle instead of electronegativity. Questions of what is good for us may therefore be put safely aside. The physicist does not worry about what is good for the atoms; neither should the task of the economist be to determine what's good...
...Nazi brothel. Brass, a Falstaffian figure with a temper as big as his waistline, soon decided that Vidal's script was too bourgeois for his taste. "It was the work of an aging arteriosclerotic," he says. "Vidal redid it five times, but it was still absurd." With the help of McDowell, Brass rewrote the screenplay...
...matter how absurd...
Many of the studies seem trivial and absurd. After encountering a study like "Resource Allocation Models for the Arkansas State Police," one is hardly tempted to wade through the remaining hundreds of thousands of pages on the shelves. Neither does the prospect of learning the arcane contents of "An Annotated Bibliography of Dynamic Cloud Modeling" set the pulse racing. Yet there are many striking and subtly disconcerting papers tacked away in the stacks. For example, how did Rand researchers get the extensive bibliographical data they included in a profile done in the late '60s of an elite six-man Vietcong...