Word: barkings
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Devotion (Warner) is a three-year-old strip of damp bark off Warners' wartime backlog. Actually rather better than the average movie, it only looks worse because 1) it is so self-consciously serious, 2) it turns a good movie subject into a peculiarly lifeless romance. The highly romantic subject: the lives & loves-particularly the loves-of the Brontë sisters...
...ancient fiber (the Egyptians wrapped mummies in ramie cloth), ramie is the world's best for many purposes. But it is hard to separate the bark (decorticate) from the ramie fiber. To date, decortication has been done economically only in the Orient with coolie hand labor. The plant thrives in the South, but ramie has failed in the U.S. as a commercial fiber, for lack of an efficient mechanical decorticator...
After the Doolittle bombing of Tokyo, the Japs decided that they had to retaliate somehow. They spent years, and $18,000,000, researching and manufacturing long-range gas bags, mostly of mulberry-bark paper. Some 9.000 were launched. Only 283 are known to have landed in the Eastern Pacific or North America. No military damage was done. A few grass fires were started and six people were killed-when an Oregon child tampered with an unexploded bomb...
...restore to him his fireside social life, nocturnal rest, capacity to concentrate on his work, and general peace of mind-all gone now, said he. The thief of his serenity, deposed the editor-critic-raconteur-philologist's petition, was a dog next door who passed his life barking-a "large, powerful male dog of breed or breeds unknown to your orator." The barking, pursued Mencken, was "abnormally and extraordinarily loud, harsh, penetrating, violent, unpleasant, and distracting." He prayed that the court would compel his neighbor to take dog and bark away. The court gave Dog Owner Charles Fortenbaugh...
While Michelangelo was furiously improving the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel for Pope Julius II, a handful of Papuans were equally hard at work in a New Guinea clubhouse. They fashioned masks 10 feet high out of bark. Each mask represented a mythological spirit, but no Renaissance classicist could have recognized the 100 weird, bearded birds and sharp toothed half-humans who emerged, after ten years of labor, from the clubhouse. And Europeans, who like to think of art as immortal, would have been amazed to see the masks burned (after a month of ceremonial dances) amid the acclamations...