Word: bending
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Memphis, summer 1978. A steamy day in the pleasant but tired Southern town, nestled in a bend of the Mississippi, that gave America the blues, W.C. Handy and Beale Street, Holiday Inns and Piggly Wiggly supermarkets. And Elvis Presley...
...simply built a robot; any science fair show-off can do that. He had built a better robot. At 6 ft. 8 in. and 275 lbs., Arok looks something like an air-conditioning duct on roller skates. But this man of steel can lift 125 lbs. dead weight, bend 45° at the waist and locomote forward or backward at a top speed of 3 m.p.h. Arok can vacuum the rug, take out the trash, serve a tray of Dr. Peppers' (Skora does not drink hard liquor...
Arok's lips move when he speaks, or rather, when Skora speaks through him. Slip a preprogrammed tape cassette into a slot in Arok's back and he will perform a medley of his domestic hits: bend over, rotate his head 180°, shake your hand, tell bad jokes: "You can be replaced by a robot because robots never make mistakes, mistakes, mistakes...
Instead one wades deeper into ever shallowing waters. The beach house belongs to a fragile and frigid family: Dad (E.G. Marshall) is preoccupied with his lawyering; Mom (Geraldine Page) is round the bend for causes never fully explained, but presumably having to do with everybody's failure to talk and touch with any real warmth. Their three daughters are a successful poet (Diane Keaton) married to a novelist who boozes because her reviews are better than his; an actress (Kristin Griffith) who can only get parts on TV; and a young woman (Marybeth Hurt) with the spirit...
Some 500 companies are locked in a desperate recruiting battle for a severely limited number of workers. The more esoteric the specialty, the keener the competition. The mere mention of the name of an MOS (metal on silicon) engineer causes executive knees to bend. In personnel offices, linear engineers and microsystems programmers are spoken of in awed whispers, as if they were deities...