Word: absurdities
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Such gestures may seem absurd to foreigners, but Gaddafi justifies them as a return to Islamic principles of old. "When we do these things," he says, "we purge ourselves of impurity that is a product of imperialism and return to the true values of Islam." Gaddafi still lives in a barren two-room apartment at the Aziziya army barracks with his second wife Safiya, a former nurse whom he met two years ago while he was recovering from an automobile accident. She has presented him with a son, whom he named Seif al-Islam (sword of Islam), and is expecting...
...play is highly exhilarating, with two excruciatingly funny sequences. In one of them, Hero cons a board of professors into giving him his doctorate after an absurd display of bogus scholarship. One dotty, dozing old Dickensian expert confuses every fifth or sixth line of dialogue with the title of a Dickens novel, which is fairly hilarious all by itself. Another laugh-bulging scene is a Madison Avenue group-think probe, complete with gestures à la charades, as to why a cleaning company's detergent spray produces mud when a housewife uses...
BYRON'S STORY is stranger in the traditional sense of the absurd. Once for example he was running along the beach and drawn to a mansion in which he found a dead, mutilated woman. He set about to erase her by burying her and burning her books and photos, and is relieved of his inner drive only when everything is in order...
INSANITY. To end "the present absurd use of the insanity defense," no plea on the defendant's mental state would be permitted at trial except the contention that he did not know what he was doing -"for example, whether the defendant knew he was pulling the trigger of a gun." If the jury decided that he had actually committed a crime, the convicted defendant could then introduce broad evidence on his sanity so that the judge could decide whether he should be imprisoned or sent to a mental institution...
...that good academics don't necessarily make good administrators. Almost every department at Harvard has been poorly run at some time or another because of an eminent scholar who happened to be an incompetent chairman. The Romance Languages Department back in the fifties carried this tendency to its absurd conclusion when it stopped running altogether, and McGeorge Bundy stepped in to take over the department and quell its disputes...