Word: grossness
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Baker's other great gift is his consistency. Each year he finds the endurance to be sharp and fresh and surprising nearly 150 times. The gross wordage he turns out over a year would amount to a fair-size novel. In Baker's book-lined office on the tenth floor of the Times building, just off Times Square, is a photo of the Marx brothers. The inscription is by Groucho, and it reads, "You are the reason I read the New York Times...
...singleminded, this film attempts to crossbreed the scare tactics of Jaws with the sci-fi hardware of Star Wars. The result is a cinematic bastard, and a pretty mean bastard at that. Alien contains a couple of genuine jolts, a barrage of convincing special effects and enough gore to gross out children of all ages. What is missing is wit, imagination and the vaguest hint of human feeling. Luckily for Alien's creators, such ingredients are not really essential at the nation's box offices, especially during the sunstroke season...
Violence on TV, despite protests, does not seem to be declining. Last month Professors George Gerbner and Larry Gross of the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School of Communications came out with their tenth annual Violence Profile. On the basis of a prime-time and a weekend sampling, they report that crooks still make up 17% of all television characters (vs. 1% or less in real life), and that 65% of them are involved in violence. The damage, Gross argues, does not lie in rare incitements to acts of violence, but in the attitudes and views of the world...
Other studies seem to support Gross's finding. Leonard Eron, a professor of psychology at the University of Illinois, conducted a ten-year investigation, ending in 1970, on 875 third-grade children in a semirural part of New York State. Eron started with the conviction that the impact of television on people was no greater than that of movies, fairy tales or comic strips. He now believes that a "direct, positive relation" exists between TV viewing by small boys and aggressive behavior. Little girls, significantly, did not show any increase in such aggressive behavior. But a new project Eron...
...spent $38.9 billion in medical outlays of all kinds (hospital bills, physicians' fees, lab tests). That amounted to 5.9% of total spending for all goods and services. Since then the bill has increased by 429%. This year the total is expected to reach $206 billion, or 9.1% of the gross national product. The White House estimates that at the present rate of increase, medical costs will double every five years, a rise far in excess of inflation. Says Dr. Richard Corlin, president of the Los Angeles County Medical Association, with only mild hyperbole: "We are now in a position...