Word: bentley
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After Kentucky's legislature author ized a 10% hike in school taxes, the Pike County school board duly upped its budget, then sought the necessary majority approval from the eight-magistrate fiscal court. Never, cried Magistrates Taylor Justice, Foster Bentley, Burbage Prater and Darwin Newsome. Because the tax rise exempts utilities from paying more property taxes than they already do, charged the magis trates, the school board actually was seeking an "illegal" 20.8% hike for ordinary citizens...
Geneticist Bentley Glass incited the fuss last winter when he suggested that human bodies began balding as soon as warm clothes ended the need for tufted torsos. Scoffing, one writer charged Glass with Lamarckianism, the discredited 1809 theory of French Naturalist Jean Baptiste Lamarck, who argued that giraffe necks grew long because the animals preferred eating treetop leaves and that such acquired characteristics could be passed on to offspring. In rebuttal, Glass argued that man's use of fire as well as clothing changed his environment enough "to make hairiness an inconsequential feature, except on the more exposed parts...
...Virginia Woolf to Osborne's Inadmissible Evidence, from the novels of John Marquand to the novels of John O'Hara. John Cheever, who writes of middle age with autumnal sadness, is its prose laureate. In O Youth and Beauty!, he tells of the ritual of Cash Bentley, a former track star turned 40 who, when the Saturday-night suburban party was guttering out between the empty gin bottles and the full ashtrays, would pile the furniture together in clumps and at a friend's revolver shot, go hurdling over...
This is Cash Bentley's race against time, and he "ran it alone, but it was extraordinary to see this man of forty surmount so many obstacles so gracefully." At one party, he fails to clear a chest and slams to the floor, breaking his leg. He recovers, a morose and different man. Late one night at home, he is obsessed with running the race again. He hands the revolver to his wife, who is unfamiliar with it. With a hurried instruction about the safety catch, he is off. She shoots him dead in mid-air over the sofa...
Reverse Oedipal Tide. Most middle-agers do not fight the clock as fatally as Cash Bentley, but many try to turn it back. Some middle-aged husbands decide that not time, but their wives, are sapping their lives. This is the age of the domestic tirade, à la Virginia Woolf. The wife feels neglected, the husband feels nagged, both feel thoroughly bored with each other. According to Dr. Masters and Psychologist Johnson in Human Sexual Response, there is a marked flagging of male potency in the 40s, but it is not so much physical as psychic impotence...