Word: gagged
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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BONJOUR LA, BONJOUR is sophisticated soap opera--the kind aimed at people who gag on the tepid nonsense shown on daytime television but thrill to tales of middle class soul rot served up as "serious" drama or Victorian novels...
...vanished era; it demanded, and got, a great deal of time and attention. It coiled and ran and turned back on itself, wandering off into apparent non sequiturs to test the listener, piling metaphor on private joke, allusion on trope, and then puncturing the entire edifice with some foxy gag...
Crichton departs from the formula in only one respect: whenever possible, he forces gratuitous cruelty between cliches. Dogs chew rats. A prisoner escaping from Newgate slices up his hands climbing the fence. Connery later strangles this poor innocent in cold blood. The funniest gag in the movie involves a decomposing cat. Nothing new for this butcher. In Crichton's Westworld, the most satisfying fantasies are also the bloodiest--robots blown to bits; one remembers brains being sliced up, organs flung about, dead bodies on dissection tables in Coma; now, Crichton gets his kicks injecting sadism into kiddie-movies. Bleah...
...begun in Washington. "There's been blood on the floor in some of the policy debates," admitted one State Department insider. 'Some people have been accused of virtual insubordination." The department and the White House were at odds over the issue, and the Administration imposed a virtual gag on Government Iran specialists in an effort to prevent them from talking to the press. In fact, there have been so many mistakes in U.S. policy that almost anyone involved in the subject in at least three previous Administrations probably deserves a bit of blame. The badly weakened CIA, which...
Carried further, mannerism turns into jokes. One exponent of the building as sight gag is Chicago Architect Stanley Tigerman. His best-known visual joke is the Daisy House in Porter Beach, Ind. The house is in the shape of a phallus; a flight of white concrete steps, cascading down to the lake shore, represents the semen. Tigerman can also be serious, as in his award-winning Library for the Blind and Physically Handicapped at the University of Illinois' Chicago Circle campus. Since most blind people are at least partly sighted, and can register color, the library is candied with bright...