Word: carping
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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This blend of new and old was apparent at the Pearl River Fisheries Research Institute, where we saw mammoth carp that had been raised from tiny fry in the center's ponds. One innovation: the use of female hormones to encourage spawning. But the biologists there also adhered to the Maoist maxim to "change wastes into treasures and turn harmful into beneficial." They feed the fish animal and even human wastes (after fermentation to kill fecal parasites). Elsewhere, the Chinese are introducing "digesters" (small tanks) that convert biological wastes into methane gas, which in turn powers electrical generators...
There is something inherently suspect about institutionalizing something as spontaneous as humor, and something even obscene in making it a sullen competition for yuks, as the Lampoon has done. The resultant brand of humor, inevitably perhaps, irritates--no, it offends. And by this I don't mean to carp on racism and sexism, although I think these elements are well in evidence in On the Lam. Rather, I mean the sort of comedy that points down, from an affected stance of intellectual or cultural superiority, lacking any sort of humanism or fellow feeling, without any hint that the Lampoon itself...
...plight of U.S. passenger travel is downright humiliating when it is compared with the superb services of, say, Japan, France and Britain. British trains run so close to the mark that passengers carp about a five-minute overdue arrival. Japan's celebrated bullet trains, at up to 130 m.p.h., make the U.S. counterparts seem like earthworms. Naturally such service does not come free. Britain subsidizes its trains at a yearly rate of $728 million, Japan (with less than half the U.S. track mileage) at $4.1 billion and France at $930 million...
Student reaction to the demonstration was mixed. "I think the demonstrators seem fairly innocuous and law-abiding." Jeffrey Marshall, a third-year law student said yesterday as he listened to CARP speakers in front of the Science Center. "It seems to me they are having the right to speak freely," he added...
...Itzkowitz '82 disagreed, saying the protesters were "twisting the idea" of freedom of religion, adding that CARP tries to force people to adopt its viewpoints