Word: ballooned
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...series of Air Force experiments designed to test human reaction to stratospheric flight (as in rocketcraft or manned satellites), Air Force Captain Joe W. Kittinger Jr. this week soared in a balloon over South St. Paul to a new manned balloon altitude record: 18 miles (96,000 ft.), besting the old Navy-made mark, set last November, by almost four miles...
...from a novel by Jules Verne, the story relates the adventures of a very correct 19th century English gentleman who, on a wager, sets out to circle the globe in eighty days. So he packs up a couple of shirts and his valet and proceeds by train, sailing ship, balloon, elephant, windpropelled railroad car, and various other exotic means of transportation. Somewhere in India a love interest enters in the shape of a native--though properly British-educated--princess whom the travelers rescue as she is about to be sacrificed on her late husband's funeral pyre. There is even...
...situations are seldom better than the lines, being funny mainly when the action is slapstick--a plant suddenly sprouting in joyful abundance all over the stage is the most bearable example. But the author occasionally leaps out of his verbal rut to pierce a pet political balloon very neatly: "Senator Cotton Joe Somethingorother is in the hospital." "Disease serious?" "Senility." "Then how can he be chairman of our committee?" Seniority." But originality is not rampant even here. Nowhere in the play is the humor more than mildly reminiscent of author John Patrick's lighthearted previous creation, Teahouse of the August...
Exploding the devices from balloons will reduce this local fallout. There will be no tower to vaporize (the balloon hardly counts), and if the balloon is tethered high enough, the rising cloud will drag no hot dust with...
...this would be no better show business than it is playwriting. But Mayehoff has no equal at harrumphing or at jerking his head, at skinning a cliché or stuffing a shirt or making very little sound like even less. And no one has quite the lost-in-a-balloon aplomb or the Mad-King-of-Bavaria hauteur of Cyril Ritchard. At the same time no one knows more surefire tricks. Ritchard will do as many absurd and outrageous things to keep an audience amused as a desperate father will do to make his four-year-old darling...