Word: flopped
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...Slick Flop. He had come, it seemed, to an art style of his own after a good many years of following other people's. "At seven," he says, "I was definitely modernistic in outlook. My first painting was rather like a fumbling Matisse." He grew up to paint slick surrealist canvases. When he showed 30 of them in Dublin three years ago, he sold only two or three; when he hauled out more than 100 in his own Belfast, not a one was sold. Middleton supported his wife and three children by working as a damask designer...
More to the point, this was definitely one of the group's ups, and they performed the Mass with such success that its 160-odd years of neglect seem an unforgivable oversight. The only uncooperative figure was Trinity Church itself, which turned out to be an acoustical flop. It has no capacity for distributing sound throughout its Romanesque caverns, and if you were sitting as I was with the basses and tenors turned away from you, you scarcely heard them...
This was small consolation to airmen or British taxpayers who had paid an estimated $28 to $40 million for the governmental bungling that had caused the flop. Said Avro Managing Director Sir Roy Dobson: "I will have to have a contract written in rock before I will build another civil aircraft. I would like to see the whole lot [of Tudors] swept out and burned so that we can forget this ghastly chapter and start again...
...When the flop-haired little man popped out of the wings and strode briskly to the podium, the sedate English audience in Manchester's green-walled Albert Hall jumped to its feet, cheering like a football crowd. As he bowed time & again, Conductor John Barbirolli's black mane fell over his eyes and he had to push it back. After five minutes of solid ovation, he turned, with tears on his cheeks, to lead Manchester's Hallé Orchestra through the night's concert...
...flop of the year was Preston Tucker; he spent over $20 million turning out 39 handmade cars, and at year's end was sadly muttering: "All I need is money." If there was a Businessman of the Year it was Automaker Paul G. Hoffman, who left his job as president of Studebaker and climbed into the driver's seat of ECA, the biggest politico-business enterprise in world history. He got it running with a minimum of gear clashing, and Congress found little need for back-seat driving...