Word: diced
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...stakes out a homestead on state land in Florida. He is weak in the head but strong in the arm. When the state highway department tries to have him evicted, he stubbornly stands his ground. When some gamblers try to scare him out, he knocks their heads together like dice. And when the Southern belle (who happens to be a social worker) goes after his family as well as his coupons, Elvis innocently but effectively twists the long arm of the law. Happily, he doesn't sing very often in this picture, but when he sings he sometimes scratches...
Yawns & Sneezes. In Europe, indeterminate music is now all the rage. Some composers refer to it in its milder forms as "aleatory," a term based on the Latin word "alea" (a game of dice), once thought to be derived from the word for knucklebone, out of which primitive dice were made. Although Composer Cage was preaching the aleatory doctrine eleven years' ago (in his Imaginary Landscape No. 4, he conducted an ensemble that played twelve radios simultaneously), the big boom in music-by-chance has come only recently; summer festivals at Donaueschingen and Darmstadt perform it with enthusiasm...
...Today Manhattan is in the midst of the biggest apartment-building boom in its history. But high prices since the war have tempted most builders into cutting corners, cramping spaces, and scanting on wall thicknesses. Says Architect Bernard Guenther: "Nowadays, when the fellow upstairs rolls a pair of dice, you can tell when they come up seven." Ceilings are now a standard and skimpy eight feet, and it is a rare apartment that has a working fireplace. Complains Decorator Elizabeth Draper: "The rooms are so neutral: they have no moldings or cornices, no 'eyebrows,' no character." Echoes Designer...
...simply men with a mania for numbers." Others have also noted the persistent relationship between music and math-between pure science and pure art. Barbaud himself began speculating on the musical potential of computers after reading that Haydn leaned heavily on the laws of probability and sometimes rolled dice to make a choice among possible chord and key combinations. Every type of music, Barbaud decided, must have its own laws, all equally rigid and equally mechanical. If a machine could be made to follow the rules, he reasoned, it could write music. Given proper orders, Barbaud concluded, a machine might...
...county, found teen-agers guzzling whisky, taking dope, stopping off at Rita Ainsworth's, the foremost brothel in Beaumont. When the jurors could rouse no reaction from county officials, they traveled to Austin and brought back Texas Rangers and investigators for a state legislative committee. The Rangers raided dice games and bars, took their prisoners to jail in Ranger cars when local cops declined to provide paddy wagons...