Word: chaff
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Radar operators in the West Berlin air traffic control center were startled to find unusual pips showing up on their scopes. The signals were too small to be airplanes, much too concentrated to be a rainstorm. They were, in fact, reflections from great batches of aluminum chaff* dumped into the sky by high-flying Soviet planes. The idea, presumably, was to test new ways of confusing the flow of Western planes...
Equally skillful in sorting the wheat from the chaff is O. (for Oscar) Henry Brandon, 45, of the London Sunday Times. Urbane, Czech-born Henry Brandon, a naturalized Briton, ranges with catholic and insatiable curiosity over the entire U.S., detailing everything from traffic jams to supermarkets. "Europe has become more and more Americanized," he says, "so Europeans are greatly interested in how the U.S. copes with such things." Best known for his probing interviews, he has lugged his tape recorder into sessions with Leonard Bernstein, Marilyn Monroe, Reinhold Niebuhr, Wernher von Braun, a spate of politicians from Nixon to Kennedy...
...here: it's heaven and boys, too." Applications mount eight to ten per cent yearly: the 279 freshmen in the Class of 1984 were culled from a field of approximately 1,800. With most of the 1,000 secondary schools which now send in applicants carefully winnowing away the chaff, more than half of the total are girls with much to offer and much to gain...
...play's outstanding virtue is marvelous economy. Though it is not a particularly easy task to present an entire psychoanalytic study in two and a half hours, Denker does it by omitting needless chaff almost entirely. The result, admittedly, is a somewhat, oversimplified representation, but it is still a remarkable achievement. Very little that is said or done in the bulk of the play lacks purpose, and for this reason it holds audience interest to an extent that I, for one, have rarely seen before...
...becomes a joke. The mindless cliches, the lists of important events, all the accoutrements of the historical scholar's language are displayed, and not one of them is bright or new. (It was with some charity that I did not choose the work of a sociologist.) Why should this chaff not be parodied? That the author is a distinguished scholar whose reputation would hardly suffer is certain; it sems a fine subject...