Word: cipher
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...play, written shortly before World War I, Shaw dramatized the sundering of the social fabric of Western civilization. Stoppard is concerned with the moral fabric, the abyss of nonbelief. He sees man, devoid of metaphysical absolutes, as rending his fellow man and reducing the planet to a desolate, lifeless cipher rather like the moon, which is a key symbol in Jumpers...
Hulot, on the other hand, is just a pleasantly boring presence, a cipher who shows no feelings beyond a spaniel-like curiosity and momentary flutters of frustration that never approach the level of anxiety, let alone threaten him with breakdown. He and the people he encounters are scarcely less abstract than their settings, juiceless and lifeless. Going to a Tati movie for laughs is about as practical as going to an exhibition of Mondrian paintings with the same goal in mind, though the painter may actually excel the actor in terms of motion and emotion. · Richard Schickel
...everybody, that I for one couldn't tell you whether Lazenby's dead or alive? Well, it was pats on the back for us cynics who looked upon efforts to replace Sean Connery with skepticism after that one. Better to retire the series undefeated, than replace Him with the cipher Lazenby -- who promptly confirmed our worst fears. None of this daunted producers Broccoli and Saltzman, who are determined to cash in on the Bond phenomenon. They came up with Roger Moore, who was no big deal as the Saint. So. More is a credible 007, dignified if a little stiff...
...Saigonese suggested that the CIA might have used expert forgers as a means of punishing the corrupt minister, who was scarcely in a position to complain. All a forger would need in such a case would be an authentic check and a signature with which to practice, or the cipher code of a numbered account. Once that is provided, Swiss banks cash checks for almost any amount with few questions asked. As one banker put it last week...
...August 1914, despite a graceless translation and fictional failures, is an extraordinary book. The horrors of the 20th century have produced a more and more widespread belief that, confronted by such things as bureaucracy, modern war and concentration camps, man is necessarily reduced to pliable victim, meaningless cipher, hopeless bundle of conditioned reflexes. Solzhenitsyn, however, fought the Nazis for four years. He has endured slave camps and near death from cancer. His experiences seem to have produced a strong belief in the existence of an inextinguishable sense of justice in human society and-despite the power and prevalence of evil...