Word: cigar
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...unexplained disappearances during presidential trips, Pierre was always sharp at painting the broad picture. "He would start talking," says one veteran newsman, "and he would damn near write your story for you." On the big stories, such as the Cuba missile crisis, Salinger rolled up his sleeves, lit a cigar the size of a shinny stick and plowed into his work with admirable professionalism. Most any time he was good for some congenial argument, a $1,000 night of poker, a pungent wisecrack. Jack Kennedy made him a frequent target for teasing, and Pierre never seemed to mind it: "Plucky...
Devalued Brains. Cybernetics made Wiener famous. Even the Russians, who called him a "fat, cigar-smoking capitalist," adopted his ideas. Wherever he went he spoke eloquently of his fears that dependence on computers, if not carefully controlled, might someday devalue human brains...
...which the Surgeon General and other responsible physicians have said is harmful to the American people." Tobacco-state Senators rose in righteous wrath. Chief among them was North Carolina Democrat Sam Ervin, who borrowed a line from Rudyard Kipling: "And a woman is only a woman, but a good Cigar is a Smoke." Williams' amendment was voted down...
...products of "the system," whose hardboiled inhumanity they reflected and whose boils they were. But a healthier social order, not needing to seek someone to blame, absolves the heel of ultra-contemptibility and sees him as merely ultracompetitive. This dates Sammy more destructively than its period-piece spoofing and cigar-chomping producers. One cannot do Once in a Lifetime thrice in a lifetime...
Luckily, Kubrick has found actors who can inject significance, even tragedy, into the brash, punnish script. Chomping ceaselessly on a frayed cigar butt, Sterling Hayden's General Ripper represents a curious amalgam of William Holden and Groucho Marx. Yet, the character deepens magnificently, if momentarily, when Hayden stares shakily into the camera and wimpers his resolve to "keep my bodily fluids safe from women and the Reds." Somehow there is more than foolishness here. When the general stalks awkwardly into the washroom to shoot himself, a surge of pity undercuts the laughter. Hayden has almost created a Quixote; the nature...