Word: cranked
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...often on the heels of progress come standardization, conformity and impersonality. The citizens of Bryant Pond, Me. (pop. 500) have decided to keep at least one automated evil at bay. The town is the last in New England to rely completely on a magneto crank telephone system. When the proposal to replace the magneto phones with modern equipment came before the public utilities commission recently, more than 200 townspeople showed up to defend the system...
Also making a major appearance, as he did in a famous feud with Vladimir Nabokov, is Wilson the noble crank. Here he makes a dyspeptic but delightful attack on the cumbersome, pedantic paraphernalia assembled by the Modern Language Association (the college literature teachers' "union") to edit and publish classic American authors. The blame, says Wilson, goes back to "our oppressive Ph.D. system of which we would have been well rid if, at the time of the First World War, when we were renaming our hamburgers Salisbury Steak and our sauerkraut Liberty Cabbage, we had decided to scrap...
Mishima claimed that his tetralogy contained everything he knew about life - and presumably about death. That may have been intended in part as a rationalization for his suicide, though some Japanese have suspected that he killed himself, on a crank's political pre text, because his creative powers were failing. Western readers will have to wait for the rest of the tetralogy to make a judgment. The first two works are sometimes stunningly good; yet in both there is an odd moral frigidity, a special chill evident in his earlier works as well. For all his gifts, Mishima seems...
...growing numbers of key industries are caught in a tidal wave of orders that is clogging production lines and slowing shipments. Such industries as steel, lumber and aluminum are operating at or close to capacity. In addition, more and more manufacturers with available space and equipment are unable to crank up facilities fast enough to meet the torrent of new business. The results are spreading shortages and a sharp upswing in industrial prices. These are classic symptoms of demand-pull inflation, in which too many dollars chasing too few goods bid up prices and wages until the economy bursts into...
Each time, the pair leaves a minatory message signed AHIAR deploring mistreatment of animals. Press and public think them some sort of crank offshoot of the IRA, but the initials come straight from William Blake: "A Rob in Redbreast in a Cage/ Puts all Heaven in a Rage...