Word: grunion
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George snapped a carrot-stick in two. "We are the generation of tranquilizers and mushroom clouds, grunion hunters and men's magazines. We are born, we go to college, and then what? In the age of surrealistic art, in the butt-end semantics of Joyce and the discordant lilt of Stravinsky we are somehow yet conservative. We stand marking time, unimpressed, hands skin-deep in mental hip pockets...
...brazen rascals: fraudulent attorney, flimflamming explorer, dissolute college president, amoral private eye, cozening operatic entrepreneur, horse doctor posing as a fashionable neurologist ("Either this man is dead or my watch has stopped"), bogus Emperor of France?using such aliases as J. Cheever Loophole, Captain Spaulding, Professor Wagstaff, Detective Sam Grunion, Otis. B. Driftwood, Wolf J. Flywheel and Napoleon. Whatever the alias or whatever the rascality, he was always the same rascal, the con man who made no bones about the disdain he felt for the suckers he was trimming...
Groucho as Sam Grunion, astigmatic private eye, narrates the story. Fabulously valuable hot diamonds are accidentally stolen by a kleptomaniac tramp (Harpo) on a foraging trip for a group of starving young actors. The seductive Madame Egelinka (Ilona Massey) and her two musclebound minions try to recover the jewels from Harpo throughout the rest of the picture while Chico, a piano-playing mind reader wanders aimlessly about complicating things...
After leaving Cambridge, Lt. Comdr. Abele took his place in the Submarine Service as skipper of the USS Grunion. in September, 1942, the ship was reported missing in action. A year later, with no word to the contrary received, he was "presumed lost in action." For his outstanding bravery in action, he received, posthumously, the Navy Cross and the Purple Heart Medal. He was also entitled to the American Defense Service Medal, the Fleet Clasp, and the Asiatic-Pacific Area Campaign Ribbon. In his honor, the government launched the destroyer USS Mannert L. Abele on April...
Most notable grunioneer was hefty, fun-loving Governor Earl Warren, vacationing with his family at Santa Monica. He became an uninhibited thrasher in the surf, risked undignified dunkings groping for grunion. But for all his delighted flopping-about he caught only two. His ten-year-old son, Bobby...