Word: corns
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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DIRECTOR HOWARD ZIEFF used to make television commercials--it shows. Private Benjamin is shot with all the style and imagination of a thirty-second corn flakes ad. The script by Nancy Meyers, Charles Shyer and Harvey Miller is a masterpiece of banality. Everytime Private Benjamin prepares to turn in, another banal plot development rears its ugly head--and Henri, the French gynecologist, has the ugliest head of all. After transferring to France to be near him, Judy must decide between Henri and the Army...
...pace of old movies jars the viewer, and even then everyone insisted on waving and posing for movie cameras. Two animated cartoons shown in movie theaters demonstrate the depth of feeling against the Wobblies--in one, a rat (wearing the requisite Bolshevik beard) tries to steal an ear of corn from the stockpile of a virtuous farmer. Fortunately, the farmer's vigilance matches his productivity, and he exterminates the rat (labeled "Bolshevist--IWW") with two quick shovel blows. The music in the production is less authentic and less moving--sung too well, it sounds more studio than picket line...
This year's autumn corn harvest is down 16% from 1979's large crop, and the lower yield has already pushed prices above the $3-per-bu. level, vs. $2.45 for the same period last year. Ranchers, also suffering from the drought and fearing a hike in the price of their prime feedstuff, sent more of their cattle to slaughter earlier in the summer in order to save on feeding them. Initially, this depressed beef prices, but the long-term effect will be to deplete the herds, reduce supply and make meat more expensive later. The production...
...famed botanist William Seal, a pioneer in the development of high-yield corn hybrids, began a bizarre experiment. He buried 20 pint-size bottles, each containing 1,000 seeds of 20 weed varieties, near his lab in East Lansing, Mich. His aim, in that age before weedkillers: to find out how long plowed-under seeds could survive, and thus, how long fields needed to be left fallow, to ensure a weed-free crop when replanted...
...sort of granite. Less-favored areas of the nation have mudslides, floods, strip mining, droughts, marching armies of real estate agents with compound eyes and side-mounted mandibles and, yesbygod, a volcano. (Mount St. Helens ash in the air caused the June frost here, sure as raccoons eat sweet corn, and never mind that we have June frost 18 years...