Word: fannings
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...armchair baseball fan, no one's sinecure in life is more enviable than Roger Angell's. From his comfortable niche in The New Yorker's "Sporting Scene" section, Angell turns out three well-crafted essays a year on the goings-on in major league baseball and spends the rest of his time making his rounds--down south for the exhibition season, a couple of mid-season jaunts to check out this year's contenders and non-contenders, and finally, to the playoffs and the World Series...
...Angell is not so blind a fan that he can't criticize recent negative developments in baseball. There is, for instance, the heavyhanded intrusion of network television, which dictates that World Series games be played at night in near-freezing temperatures at the end of October. Among other atrocities, television has inflicted on us Howard Cosell, who hates baseball and hates baseball fans. Cosell prides himself on being The Great Demystifier, who "tells it like it is," and shows us that baseball is a business like any other business. But the unique charm of baseball is that...
...baseball fan can linger nostalgically over these moments, precisely collected in Five Seasons, as if they were old family snapshots. Angell's love of the game is infectious; it is friends like him, Max Lapides, Don Shapiro, and Bert Gordon that will keep the sport safe from Howard Cosell, the Big "A", and all the other forces threatening to transform the subtle pleasures of baseball into just another entertainment. --Seth Kaplan
...simple moralism that many real science fiction fans may not buy, and in sci-fi terms Star Wars is strictly softcore. Lucas, a fan himself, has evoked images from some of the best-known writers in the field. Tatooine, for example, is much like the arid planet Arrakis in Frank Herbert's famed Dune trilogy; that resemblance carries even to the skeleton of one of Herbert's giant sand snakes in the background of a Tatooine scene. The barroom sequence, with its remarkable array of extraterrestrial freaks, is reminiscent of scenes written by Robert Heinlein and Samuel Delaney...
...profession whose code she helped to shape, and let there be no doubt about what that profession was. It was stardom. This is not to say that she was not, on occasion, an effective actress. It is to suggest that acting - like shading her age or flattering her fan clubs with personal attention or fighting the studio bosses for strong roles or making sure her eyebrows were properly plucked - was part of the larger job of being a star...