Word: disbelief
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Americans abroad have been boasting for years about California wines, only to be greeted in most cases by polite disbelief-or worse. Among the few fervent and respected admirers of le vin de Californie in France is a transplanted Englishman, Steven Spurrier, 34, who owns the Cave de la Madeleine wine shop, one of the best in Paris, and the Academic du Vin, a wine school whose six-week courses are attended by the French Restaurant Association's chefs and sommeliers. Last week in Paris, at a formal wine tasting organized by Spurrier, the unthinkable happened: California defeated...
...experienced crowd knows what must come next. Even as Koloff adds a twist to the chain, even as he forces Bruno farther into the ropes, the roar begins to build, cutting through the smoke and the beer and the disbelief. The obvious fakery and slapstick theatricality of the earlier bouts has been forgotten, swallowed up in screams for vengeance and blood...
...each punch is delivered--these are the basic elements of professional wrestling. Second-rate actors like Man Mountain Mike (a quarter ton of lard) and Baron Scicluna use these elements to create a theater of fake violence and feigned pain. The crowd falls for it (the hungering suspension of disbelief), and when the greatest hero (Bruno) meets the most vicious villain (Koloff) their dissembling of pain and terror raises the crowd to levels of cruelty and desperation you don't find in any sport. In sports, the violence is sublimated to the greater purpose of wining goals and scoring points...
Philosopher Mortimer J. Adler, chairman of the board of editors of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, rejects the antischool trend. But he concedes there may be good reason for the rising disbelief in the ultimate educability of everyone. Undifferentiated schooling, writes Adler, may be "doomed to defeat by differences in the children's economic, social and ethnic backgrounds and especially differences in the homes from which they come...
...view of a medium laboriously patting its own back, the ceremony is without equal in the world. But how can so much narcissism be combined with so little real glamour? It is the lack of illusion that makes Oscar night look moribund. There is a point when disbelief can no longer be suspended: O.J. Simpson is not Gary Grant, and although Jacqueline Bisset may be the most beautiful girl in the world, she is not Ava Gardner. Without such priests and priestesses, the fertility rite means nothing...