Word: gruel
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...stabilized. He slowly regained consciousness and was able to move his arms and legs. The next day he was pointing to his mouth, indicating that he wanted his teeth brushed. Physical therapists exercised Clark's arms and legs to prevent the muscles from atrophying. He was fed a gruel-like mixture through a tube inserted in his nostril and snaked down his throat and into his stomach. At week's end Clark was still slowly improving, although his doctors remained concerned about the possibility of brain damage...
Even if a state's citizens and leaders decided that it was fine to cut costs by giving inmates gruel and just enough space to brood lying down, the federal judiciary's notions of decency would no longer permit them to do so. During the past ten years, a conservative Supreme Court affirmed, and then cautiously circumscribed, the range of prison conditions deemed unconstitutional, and the discretion of lower federal judges to order remedies. In its 1976 decision in the Texas case Estelle vs. Gamble, and even more powerfully two years later in Hutto vs. Finney, a case involving sickeningly...
VIDEO GAMES FLATTEN BOREDOM. They project the banality of the assembly line onto two-dimensional electronic hallucinogenics. Their garish griminess is as dipped in materialism as the somber sootiness of the factory. Like factories, they furnish the means of subsistence--a numbingly overspiced gruel of colorful flashes, bangs, whooshes, titillating, not nourishing the senses. Their predictability flexes but little the imagination. Punching in the clock; pressing the start button. Filing form A and tightening bolt C evokes the practiced and repetitive pacing of the player's dot across a screen. Punching out the clock; GAME OVER...
Will argued that "modernity" has made the U.S. vulnerable because it has made our sense of "citizenship" and "warmth" become "thin gruel...
While the rest of the neighborhood wonders when it will be wired for cable and settles down for another dose of network gruel, the weird piece of machinery across the way is pulling down programs from at least three pay-TV companies. Plus "feeds" from network correspondents hours before the evening news gets on the air. Plus NASA transmissions of pictures from Saturn. Plus soccer from Brazil. Plus the glorious miscellany of perhaps 50 to 60 programs a day, from closed-circuit prizefights to S.R.O. symphony concerts that are beamed off whichever satellite is being tuned...