Word: ennui
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...Apollo 7 whirled through orbit after orbit around the earth last week, the growing monotony of the mission was a major measure of its success. Presented with little challenge from the well-functioning spacecraft, Astronauts Wally Schirra, Walter Cunningham and Donn Eisele fought off ennui as they plodded through the humdrum housekeeping and engineering duties necessary to prove their craft moonworthy. They fired and refired the ship's big rocket engine and practiced sighting stars through a sextant; they tested their computers and cooling system, and transmitted to a ground station the same sort of signals a lunar module...
...they were dictating letters to a tape recorder. Tommy Steele's hyperthyroid performance mistakes popped eyeballs for emotion and shrieks for singing. Coppola's idea of a scene-stopper is a bunch of flowers. Whenever the action halts, he brings on fields of roses, daffodils and chrysanthemums. Ennui is so frequent that by the end, Finian's Rainbow boasts more bouquets than a Mafia funeral...
...vapid pick-up, a sick-sweet Bailey's sundae, and a frantically joyful party are not subtle devices; but they convey Waletzky's theme--aimlessness and Sunday-afternoon ennui--without themselves being aimless or boring. Sally is the aimless one. She has abandoned her commitment, and though that happens to be an East Cambridge rent project, it could as easily have been politics, creativity, or just another person...
...Tommies under his command is hot-tempered, brawling Gunner Danny O'Rourke, who defies ennui not with ambition but with fury. Nicol Williamson portrays O'Rourke as a sardonic, 20th century Ahab, ever raging against a malevolent creation. He sees barracks boredom as proof that God mocks man's aspirations, a daily confirmation of the absurdity of it all. Infuriated by Evans' platitudes, O'Rourke responds by plunging his fist into a stove and slowly squeezing the heat out of a burning coal...
Vocational training: the very phrase calls up the smell of plastic ashtrays, the clink of copper trinkets, the ennui of workshops crowded with delinquents manning lathes and squirting grease into crankcases. Vocational training should be a major source of steady employment for U.S. youths. Instead, it has become an educational junkyard for rejects from a college-geared society...