Word: humbug
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Lampoon president Edward M. Tarlov '60 claimed that his organization had arranged the parody. "I've got 560 signatures affirming that the Fortnightly could not have possibly handled such an issue." A Fortnightly editor countered, "Humbug. People just don't believe aristocrats can be funny. We proved they are wrong...
...Humbug Harvest. In his usual high-binding style, Nikita tried to turn a defensive outburst into a strident success story, covering 6½ pages of Pravda. When he took over five years ago, he said, Soviet agriculture was in "a very bad state," its grain output so low that cities suffered from bread shortages, its livestock population dying by the millions for lack of fodder. Only the year before, Malenkov, "to conceal the failures under his direction," had "dishonestly" put out "humbug" figures purporting to show that the country had produced 145 million tons of grain, when in cold fact...
...attempt to outlaw cartels in 1950, Erhard tried again, finally got a bill drawn up this year. At the hearings, industrialists who furnished the C.D.U. with much of its funds pleaded that cartels were necessary for times of recession. Erhard leaped from his chair, exploded: "That, gentlemen, is economic humbug." The industrialists suggested interpretations of the law be left to the courts. Snapped Erhard: "Courts are not fitted to judge whether a cartel is harmful to the economy or not. That is my job." Only Adenauer's intercession forced Erhard to accept a compromise bill permitting exceptions for "crisis...
...when Arthur Kallet co-authored a bestselling exposé of dangerous drugs hidden in popular products (100,000,000 Guinea Pigs), advertisers turned apoplectic and many a consumer turned pale. Kallet, a dark, intense young M.I.T.-trained engineer with a talent for pricking advertising humbug, had learned much of his lore by working with co-author Frederick J. Schlink's Consumers Research, Inc. which reported on the quality of consumer products...
...charge of promoting annual, trumped-up presentations of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol. For the first of this season's versions, televised last week, the VP persuaded CBS and Chrysler's Shower of Stars to turn the durable old holiday cliche into elaborate but dismal humbug...