Word: cranks
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...keeps tabs on everything and everyone. Last week he conferred with Count Dino Grandi on the codification of labor laws; talked with Hungarian Premier Count Teleki; witnessed experiments with thermite incendiary bombs and defenses against them; rewarded aviators and received journalists who served in the Spanish war; turned the crank of an invention designed to extract iron ore from black sand along the coast near Rome; conferred with Crown Prince Umberto about that half of the Army which the Prince commands...
...infringements on their sacred privileges are probably deeply resented nevertheless. Before the World War, Josephus Daniels, our Secretary of the Navy then, "vigorously democratized" the naval service. Because of this he was never popular with the Annapolis crowd, who considered him a small-time busy demagogue-and political crank. A man promoted from the ranks was stigmatized as a "mustang." Whenever naval officers gathered in a French cafe during the War, a popular song...
...sunny soul like Spinoza, an Olympian spirit like Goethe. They can complain, and do, that psychiatrists have never made clear the difference, if any, between scientific and artistic talent. Nor have the doctors explained whether a neurotic is: 1) a long-fingered person of "artistic temperament"; 2) a crank who looks under the bed every night or constantly washes his hands; or 3) a robust grappler with convention...
...away!" He stopped other gallery-goers to tell them he was the world's greatest artist, passed out handbills describing himself as "Mesmerist-Prophet and Mystic, Humorist Galore, Ex All Round Athletic Sportsman (to 1889), Scientist supreme: all ologies, Ex Fancy amateur Dancer. . . ." He wrote crank letters to the newspapers. His letterhead: "Mahatma Dr. Louis M. Eilshemius, M.A. etc., Mightiest Mind and Wonder of the Worlds, Supreme Parnassian and Grand Transcendant Eagle of Art." His paintings, on the rare occasions he could get them shown, brought horse laughs from critics and public alike...
...three of Manhattan's swank 57th Street galleries- Kleemann, Boyer, Valentine, he was being given simultaneous one-man shows. Another Eilshemius exhibition was touring the Pacific Coast; a fifth was about to be sent through the Middle West. In seven short years the Mahatma has turned from a crank to a cult. Manhattan's sedate Metropolitan Museum has three of his canvases, and he is represented in virtually every important public and private art collection...