Word: distract
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From long practice Mr. Chamberlain knows, the advantage of cracking an early jest to distract his victims from the impending thumbscrew of his Budget revelations. Last year he said: "Perhaps I may liken this budget to the uncertain glories of an April Day." This year if he had drawn on the calendar for his opening banter he would have had to choose the month of November, so he changed his tack, orated: "It has been suggested that I tax bachelors, bicycles, cats, dogs, debutantes, fiction, loudspeakers and other things. . . . None of these things...
Although at 18 he was a $10,000-a-year veteran, Pitcher Feller this spring was still enough of a novelty to distract baseball addicts' attention from the recruit players who usually make most training-camp news. Most remarkable rookies of the year appeared to be Giant Pitcher Carl Hubbell's young Brother John, who showed promise while the Giants were mysteriously losing a string of early games to semi-pro teams in Cuba; Yankee Outfielder Joe Di Maggio's older Brother Vince who tried out at third base with the Boston Bees; and a 19-year...
...They are jailed. They climb the Alps and get lost in the snow. They meet a jolly hermit. They foil the robbers who follow them disguised as minstrels in an empty beer keg on wheels. Finally, the robbers resort to collecting all the hurdy-gurdies in the region to distract the boy from his long enough for them to get the gold. This fails too when the string of hurdy-gurdies cascade down a mountain trail in a careening dance. The robbers are nabbed, the boy gets the gold...
...submachine guns "in readiness." The city of Sian. scene of the kidnapping, was reported in unconfirmed dispatches to have been taken over by a Chinese Communist army, and jittery Japanese continued to fear that the Premier's fantastic kidnapping and its fantastic sequels were largely a blind to distract world attention from a drawing together of Chiang's China and Stalin's Russia for united war on Japan...
...Civic Virtue. Last week artisans at the Roman Bronze Works were putting finishing touches on one of the biggest jobs of bronze casting the company has ever handled, and workmen in Rockefeller Center were chopping holes in the Fifth Avenue pavement for a statue of Atlas destined to distract public attention from Prometheus for many weeks to come...