Word: decays
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...stand these creeps." says Jan. "Those are not creeps, my dear," says one of the creeps, "they are contacts with the heartbeats of a nation in decay." Among the heartbeatniks: Bummy Car-well (Larry Hagman), incipient novelist ("I'm a writer-I'm out there on the periphery handling unexploited materials"); Danny (Thomas Aldredge), a marijuana-fueled poet who mumbles about the "crypto-neo-reactionaries"; and Yogi (Del Close), a stubble-bearded anti-homosexual crusader who gets most of the show's laughs...
Change Is Decay. To the Babylonians, Egyptians and Hebrews, the world was an oyster, water below, water above (it seeped through the upper dome as rain), with the earth as snug and central as a pearl. But between the 6th and 3rd centuries B.C., the Greeks reached certain conclusions that were to be ignored for the next 2,000 years, e.g., that the earth rotated on its axis, that the sun was the center of the universe...
...failure of nerve, Koestler believes, sabotaged these true starts toward knowledge. Faced with a Greek society already in decline, Plato equated any change with decay. For philosophic reasons, he decided that the sphere was the only perfect shape, that the world must be a perfect sphere and that the motion of heavenly bodies must be in perfect circles at uniform speed. Aristotle returned to the idea of an immobile earth and placed it in the center of nine concentric, transparent spheres, outside which was the Unmoved Mover who kept the whole machinery turning. To make the heavens jibe with Aristotle...
...complaint about rats in the neighborhood led William Gentry, a Baltimore health-department inspector, from house to house on Baltimore's Reisterstown Road until he came to the home of one Aaron D. Frank. One quick look showed the Frank house to be in "an extreme state of decay," and disclosed-as health-department officialese put it-a backyard pile of "rodent feces mixed with straw and trash and debris to approximately half a ton." But Aaron Frank refused to let the inspector in the house without a warrant. After Inspector Gentry was kept out a second time, Householder...
Anybody who has ever collected star fish well knows how an interesting object can in a few days turn into a wad of putrid decay; this latest addition to the literature of the down-and-out is a sign that we have a literary star fish on our hands that must be buried, and quickly...