Word: humbug
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...personal stake in Lenny Bruce for nearly a half-century. I first heard about him in 1959 from the cartoonist Arnold Roth, who was a crucial contributor to the Harvey Kurtzman magazine Humbug, and who lived in Philadelphia, as I did. With a kindness that I think back on with gratitude and bafflement, he befriended this gauche but eager 14-year-old and, in the genial tutorial that was our conversations, recommended that I listen to Lenny's albums...
...Humbug fat track hit you like a drug...
Born in Minneapolis and raised in Los Angeles, he lapped up the best of midcentury America's comic culture: the visual surrealism of Ernie Kovacs' TV shows, the lunatic satire of Harvey Kurtzman's Mad and Humbug comic books. Yet even then there was a zealot budding in him. He planned to become a missionary, until he had what he laughingly terms an "anti-epiphany" one day at Disneyland. Smartly dressed, he was turned away from the theme park by security guards for having long hair. "Suddenly this place I'd adored seemed in my animator's imagination like...
European retailers sure didn't have a holly jolly Christmas. The annual end-of-year shopping orgy can account for as much as 40% of a retailer's annual sales, but most of the tallying so far has left the big stores crying "Bah, humbug." And the bad news kicked in even earlier. British supermarket chain J Sainsbury last week said its same-store sales, excluding gasoline, fell 1.2% in the third quarter. Two months earlier, the company had declared a $72.5 million pretax loss for the first half - the first loss in its 135-year history...
...humbug, says Cori Pursell, 45, a mother of two from Overland Park, Kans. For the past six years, she and her husband have made a concerted effort to rein in the holiday hoopla. "Rather than focus on the shopping calendar of Christmas, we're focusing on the spiritual aspect," Pursell explains. "We've decided to not even put up a tree until the third week of Advent, and we don't decorate it until the week before Christmas." Other holiday trappings have gone out the window altogether. Several years ago, the couple stopped swathing the house in knickknacks and frills...