Word: awl
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...plot strands, which interweave effectively until the end of the film. The first involves a big mystery case that is assigned, of course, to Lise. Someone, it seems, has fallen into the rather distasteful practice of murdering members of the National Assembly in crowded places--and with an awl, no less. Lise and her squadron of affectionate detectives must find and stop this madman while Paris reverberates with the crimes...
...before the meeting of this preposterous pair that Pride of the Bimbos excels. Sayles has a deadly accurate ear for Southern cracker dialect ("Chick at awl?" asks a South Carolina gas-station attendant); the jabbering at a sand-lot baseball game ("Chuckerinthereissgahcantit"); and the good-ole-boy humor ("if that woman fell down a well, you could pump ugly for a week"). Best of all, the gruff friendship between Burns and the young son of a teammate is successfully played for both laughs and pathos; as it does in all initiation tales, the moment comes when the boy must measure...
Sick Circus. Alfred Jarry was the kind of humorist for whom laughter was a rictus; he dug for the cheek nerves with an awl. The first word of his first play-Merdre! as Jarry spelled it-discovered obscenity as a lisping child star and launched her on her modern stage career. That was 1896; Jarry was 23. His egg-shaped Père Ubu of monstrous honesty, the grotesque Dr. Faustroll with his science of 'Pataphysics and his Caesar-Antichrist are the collective grandparents of the theaters of cruelty and the absurd. As Jarry lay dying...
Milk with an Awl. In a somber, six-hour speech at the Central Committee's annual conference on farm policy, the Soviet Premier castigated "irresponsibility" and "backwardness" in almost every segment of agriculture, even to the high price of harrows in Novosibirsk and the lagging fight against weeds in Kazakhstan. Unless the party makes "tremendous efforts," he warned, "our country will face great difficulties, and serious harm will be inflicted on the cause of building Communism." To get Red farms in the black, he demanded sweeping, immediate reforms that include doubling the output of farm machines, a tenfold boost...
...table groaning with tasty dishes." But, reasoned Nikita Khrushchev, "the preaching of equality in the spirit of the early Christian communes, with their low standard of living, with their asceticism, is alien to scientific Communism. To invite people to such Communism is tantamount to slurping milk with an awl. Communism must not be regarded as a table set with empty plates around which sit high-minded and fully equal peoples." The Greatest Failure. To hasten affluence in Russia, Khrushchev in the past eight years has doubled the number of tractors (to 1,168,000) and ruthlessly cannibalized collective farms...