Word: absurdity
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...story being operatically artificial, Director Lionel Barrymore was entitled to use scenery both beautiful and absurd. But he need not have made the tale of love and hate so limp. Passion never touches the audience, which is delighted whenever Comedians Laurel & Hardy and buttocks of the horses in their care intervene to provide raucous merriment. By the success of this humor Director Barrymore reveals his failure in the main chance. And Tibbett can never be called the singing Douglas Fairbanks until his way with both horses and women is at least the equal of his attendant clowns...
...will house about 250 students which seems just about an ideal size. With that number it will be easy for everyone to know all his housemates, and for congeniality to result. It is naturally impossible, and undesirable, for all to be intimate with each other. Such an idea is absurd. Smaller groups of intimate friends within the Quad will develop, which is for the best, and wholly natural...
...amazing excess poundage of the operators themselves. With a Bayreuth baritone dangerously near the three hundred pound mark in possession of the lead role and with an unlimited heavyweight diva to repel his amorous dalliance, the best Wagnerian opera must appear either pompous and slow or considerably absurd. At present, the majority of opera singers take it for granted that their art places no restriction on their appetites. Eighteen Day Diets are to them a vague rite connected with the folk lore of the nation. Until this condition is altered, opera will continue to be a leisurely playground for pachyderms...
...absurd situation" it is, observed President Frederick Paul Keppel of the Carnegie Corporation last week, that engineers have applied their science far less to buildings than to motor cars. A car twice as good as one built a few years ago now costs half as much. The building situation, he declared, is "just about reversed." President Keppel recommended that some philanthropist create a "foundation devoted to the study of housing problems and equipped to experiment in different types of design and construction...
...they would later be re-employed as conditions permitted. There seems to be no possible excuse for the authorities' not paying off the women with at least a week's advance. Granted that the persons handling Harvard's financial affairs have to do it carefully and wisely, it is absurd for the richest university in the country to act like a penny-pinching miser. The University does, to some extent, act charitably in employing women on part time who would have difficulty in finding comparable work elsewhere, but last month's case gives no sign whatsoever of any feeling...