Word: backyard
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Doris bubbles her way to the pinnacle of soapy success, Hubby Garner begins to go down the drain out of pure jealousy. The final gurgle comes when -unknown to him-the Happy Soap folks dig a swimming pool for Doris in the backyard where the driveway used to be. That night, whump! splosh! Garner goes down with his convertible as the sound track plays a snatch of sinking-of-the-Titanic music...
...nine pool owners in the U.S. live there and cavort in 1,600,000,000 gallons of precious rain water brought in by aqueduct every day. But into every pool of rain water somebody's little life may fall. From 1952 to 1959, 102 people drowned in the backyard. And the present accident rate costs Los Angeles some 30 lives a year. By law, pool owners must fence pools off from public access. To forestall accidents, some nervous pool owners use tarpaulin or plastic covers on their pools. Others have rigged them so that an untimely splash sets...
Millions of peasants were herded into people's communes and hitched to plows. Peking broke up families, tried to ban money, jerry-built hundreds of "backyard" steel furnaces. The slogan was: "Communism can grow grain and make steel." Through brawn and "revolutionary romanticism" China was to turn almost overnight into an industrialized land. The Great Leap Forward was hailed as a short cut to Communism -and a slap at Moscow. Khrushchev warned that it could not be done. After a few months the experiment indeed collapsed. Gloating over the failure, Khrushchev told visiting Hubert Humphrey that...
Spiv & Tart. Mother rules their lives in death as she did in life. They build a sort of playhouse in her tomb in the backyard lily patch and call it The Tabernacle, and slowly evolve the forms of a religion based on the dead. Hymns and the promulgation of rules and cruel punishments comprise its simple liturgy. The fact is-not that facts, as such, mean much to them-that mother was a local scandal as a woman of loose morals (which is partly why the adults accepted the kids' story that mother was "sick...
...Backyard Ark. There are other self-deluders: the producer whose vision of himself as a healer (dispensing Understanding through Adult Entertainment) sends "waterfalls of vanity pour[ing] through the man"; the elderly German immigrant who is so convinced that he will be the sole human survivor of nuclear attack that he builds an ark in his back yard and stocks it with animals. Author Marcus writes of them with a compassion untainted by sentimentality. Like a somewhat similar writer, Hollywood's late Nathanael West (The Day of the Locust), he has a quick eye and a sharp ear. Nothing...