Word: cats
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...ruralism. I first heard it in Arizona about 1940 and had the impression it had been in use long before that. Country sayings almost invariably have a much higher poetic component than their big-city equivalents. Some of these observations have become classics, like "nervous as a long-tailed cat in a roomful of rockin' chairs." One of my particular favorites is "as lonesome as a peanut in a boxcar...
...first trauma occurred one evening towards midnight when we heard a thump from upstairs. I knew it wasn't the cat because he was outside (Indiana Jones was another one of my charges; I had the honor of feeding him every morning and of forgetting to empty his litter box, until he began to find other locales for his affairs). Maggie and I ran next door where one of my former babysitting comrades was house sitting. While looking through her windows at my house, I thought I saw shadows in the window and immediately called the police. Before the police...
...delegate slung a live cat around his neck. Two Bundestag Deputies played soccer in the aisles. From the podium, a man in a clown suit complained that the conference was interfering with Carnival, West Germany's annual spasm of pre-Lenten revelry. A delegate suggested that male candidates for the European Parliament in Strasbourg, whose nomination was the purpose of the meeting, should "undress and present themselves in the nude because the human body reveals political attitudes." Keynote Speaker Antje Vollmer railed against the "industrialized nature-destroying internationalism of neocolonialist nation states." Finally, the proceedings were disrupted...
...highway south of Beirut, one of the militiamen fed abandoned American ammunition into the vehicle's 50-cal. machine gun and fired ear-splitting bursts into the air. A few miles offshore, the menacing shape of the U.S. battleship New Jersey glided slowly past, like a big gray cat circling a bird cage. Its 16-in. guns, which had rained devastation on Druze strongholds in the Chouf Mountains the week before, were silent now, unable to do anything about the rapidly deteriorating situation on shore. The militiamen who bothered to look at the New Jersey just laughed...
Indeed, film composers have adopted the synthesizer at a tempo approaching allegro con brio. Giorgio Moroder has given it prominence in his scores for Midnight Express, Cat People and Scarface. James Horner used it along with mandolins, balalaikas and snippets of Tchaikovsky in his brooding themes for Gorky Park, and even such veteran film scorers as Quincy Jones and Lalo Schifrin have found that a judicious use of the synthesizer expands their imaginations. Observes Jones: "We're not giving up anything by using the synthesizer, only adding to the possibilities with space-age colors...