Word: goldbergian
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...usual the Administration did not help its cause by a confused approach to the issue. "The program is rather Rube Goldbergian," concedes an administrative energy adviser. Because of the bewildering intricacy of energy regulations, there is no guarantee that the fee will apply only to gasoline. Oil companies might be able to increase the price of other petroleum products, like home heating oil, thus giving a nervous Congress further cause for election-year jitters. While the Administration claims the fee would save 100,000 bbl. of oil per day, skeptical industry analysts say the reduction would be closer...
...Polaroid camera. Occupying an otherwise empty room at the museum, the camera is in effect a room within a room, a light-tight box 3.6 meters (12 ft.) wide, 3.6 meters high and 4.8 meters (16 ft.) deep. In addition to a large conventional lens, it contains a Rube Goldbergian arrangement of pulleys, ropes and rollers. While conventional Polaroid cameras are operated from the outside, the three technicians who work Land's invention position themselves inside...
Backster is the essence of conservatism compared with the book's more adventurous researchers. A New Jersey electronics buff, Pierre Paul Sauvin, attached a Rube Goldbergian machine to his plants, and then spent the weekend with his girl friend at a place 80 miles away. He found that even at that distance the plants had responded to his sexual relations with the girl. The tone oscillators went "right off the top," he says, at the moment of orgasm...
Nonetheless, the building presently seems to work. Once the initial uneasiness is gotten over, there isn't really much to hate about it. It is an imaginatively and efficiently designed place to do work, emphasized by its Rube Goldbergian technologically great studio space. But it isn't a place on would want to live in, to call home, to surround one's life with its vision, shapes and materials. The edges are too hard, the materials too inorganic, the shapes too alien, the spaces too large, and the vision too monumental. All things which are only criticisms if one asks...
...intricate, Rube Goldbergian system of primary elections clanked through its first three stages without doing fatal damage to any of the major Democratic candidates, though some were seriously hurt. How the American people were going to survive the endless spring-with 20 more primaries to go-was another question. Almost weekly, it seemed, with hurdy-gurdy and bugles, politicians were "front-running" and "slumping," buried one Tuesday to be disinterred the next week in the costly, chaotic exercise of democracy. The spectacle was beginning to give some point to Arizona Representative Morris Udall's suggestion that primaries be held...