Word: crackpot
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...recent months, a significant change has occurred: the subject has moved out of the realm of science fiction and crackpot claims. Discussions of UFOs have begun to appear in the pages of such respected journals as Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and Science. A few responsible scientists now put their reputations on the line by suggesting that saucers may be vehicles from outer space. The vast majority of their colleagues still scoff at this notion, but even some of the skeptics concede that serious investigation is needed...
...fixed his position as low man on the totem pole of literary fashion. In an age of publicity, puff and promotion, John Dos Passos never developed an exploitable personality. He never became a Great White Hunter, or a symbol of doomed gilded youth, or a pornographer, or a public crackpot or private monster, or even a member of the pansy international, any of which roles might have given him an identifiable and saleable personality. He never even wrote the kind of novels in which some character would turn up again and aeain and enable the reader to say, "There...
Normally, when someone opens his mouth and throws up his arms in London's Hyde Park, he is cranking up a harangue on Marx, the Scriptures, or the empire's twilight. Comedienne Lucille Ball, 54, could probably have done the crackpot bit as well as anyone, though, as it happened, she was just spreading her wings in the fresh spring air before going back to shooting a TV special called "Lucy Goes to London." The show won't be quite as racy as 1963's "Elizabeth Taylor in London," but Lucy swings well enough herself...
Igor Stravinsky says that there is no triumph in being 84. He confesses to a feeling of loneliness for his generation, a detachment from younger people "who see me as an elderly crackpot always in a snit." He's far from that. In an interview in the New York Review of Books this week, Composer Stravinsky shows that his mind is as sprightly and incisive as ever...
...perverted way; as Heinrich Heine said, "We Germans are idealists even when we hate." The other, and contradictory, quality is an alarming literal-mindedness, which made it possible even for many educated Germans to absorb and act on Nazism's pseudo science; other people have accepted crackpot theories about inferior races, but, unlike the Nazi leadership, they have not moved from the false premises to the insanely logical conclusion of systematic extermination...