Word: freakish
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Obsessed since childhood with a sense of exile, she called on literary exiles, among them British Poet Wystan Hugh Auden and his wife Erika Mann. Soon she was invited to join a freakish household of esthetes in Brooklyn Heights. There, sickly, shy and elflike, she presided over a dinner table whose steady boarders were Auden, Anglo-Irish Poet Louis MacNeice (now back in England for military service), British Composer Benjamin Britten, Wisconsin-raised George Davis (literary editor of Harper's Bazaar). The old brownstone became a shabby Mecca for their friends. Russian Painter Pavel Tchelitchew decorated its walls, symphonies...
...Texas Panhandle is a high (4,000 ft.) plateau, famed for its freakish weather, its cities that rise abruptly above the plain, its ranches, wheat and oil fields. It is so flat and landmarks are so rare that around Amarillo (pop. 52,000) early settlers plowed furrows from settlement to settlement to guide travelers across the trackless, treeless expanse. One such furrow was about 150 miles long. It was so bleak that an army officer who explored it in 1849 reported: "This country is, and must remain, uninhabited forever." Its wind and weather became so famous that Texans said, "There...
...Freakish incidents kept the patient population amused. Sample...
Peace. Strong on defense, Britain and France seemed weak on surprise. Neither gaunt Mr. Neville Chamberlain, taking his after-breakfast stroll as usual, nor serious M. Daladier, had the talent, training, or freakish love of shock to plan a move of the sort that Hitler had made. As profound gloom settled over the capitals of Europe-in Moscow, belatedly, as well as in Berlin-some great stroke of unprecedented originality, some inspired action unlike any that diplomatic history had known, seemed called for to answer Hitler's. But the imaginations of peace were not productive. Memories of Munich, when...
Safe as a county fair was aviation's winter meet, the All-American Air Maneuvers, at Miami last week. A half-dozen speed events went off like buggy-races. The ships that flew in them were not freakish rocket ships, but ordinary sport and businessmen's airplanes. At the finish at week's end, no open speed records had been broken, but no flier had been killed or maimed, no ship demolished. It was aviation's first big safe and sane get-together...