Word: fairly
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...basis, as opposed to the prevalent utility practice of weighting valuations of plants and equipment with replacement costs. He was willing to write-off all past write-ups discovered by the Federal Trade Commission in its six-year power investigation. As for Government competition, all he asked was a fair break-such things as the use of the same accounting method for public power projects as the Federal Power Commission prescribes for private companies, definite division of territory for rural electrification, cessation of Federal gifts to cities wanting their own distribution systems, purchase of private systems at prices...
Damsel in Distress (RKO Radio) sends Fred Astaire dancing into a foggy English countryside to rescue fair-haired, big-featured Joan Fontaine from the errant vagaries of a typical P. G. Wodehouse story. Not so lissome a heroine as light-footed Ginger Rogers (temporarily otherwise engaged), inexperienced Actress Fontaine (Olivia de Havilland's sister) goes gamely but somewhat lumberingly through the curvets and caracoles required of her. Far more facile as an Astaire partner is, of all people, rumpish Radio Dunce Gracie Allen, who with her harassed husband, George Burns, makes up the Astaire party...
Most elaborate of the dance sequences is hoofed by Astaire, Burns & Allen at a country fair. After trying their fantastic toes on turntables, rolling barrels, slippery slides, the trio trip into the magic mirror room, become stumpy, stilted, wide & narrow by turns. The climax is a mirror that clips them off, leaving only disembodied dancing legs. Reginald Gardiner, whose stage repertory includes imitations of ugly wallpaper, effeminate French railway trains, weltering bell buoys, contributes one soul-bursting scene as an aria-minded butler tossing inhibition to the wood winds and singing a tenor solo from the opera Martha...
With a show of fun and frankness unusual in his stereotyped profession, a San Francisco pressagent lately wrote: "When you come right down to it, a great World's Fair is the architect's form of that good old American custom, the Binge. . . . He can work in the realm of pure fantasy without worrying much about his client's idea of how a building ought to look, because he is using (perhaps happily) impermanent materials and because his real client is the general public, and what the general public wants is not utility, but romance and beauty...
...Francisco pressagent might well have added that when a fair is over there is frequently the devil to pay. For as often as not World's Fairs result in thumping deficits.* Last week, World Fair planners the world around had reason to ponder this fact, for one World's Fair (Paris) closed for the winter thumpingly in the red, and two others (New York and San Francisco) passed milestones in careers which they expect to turn out in equally thumping profits...