Word: humdrum
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Thursday in New York, a day like other days perhaps, but this day seemed to have a special tantalizing humdrum something. This was not the day Lincoln was shot or Normandy was invaded, not the day Pearl Harbor was bombed or Fort Sumter was fired on. What this day was (and few would know it until it moved to its inexorable climax) was the most uneventful Thursday in American history...
...reader merely folds back the issue on its plastic hinges, slips it on the turntable spindle through a ready-made hole in the center of the magazine. Wide-ranging and middle-browed, the first issue opens with a pretentious foreword ("In the beginning was the word"), plods through some humdrum popular singing, purrs with the coquetry of Cinemorsel Brigitte Bardot as she chats about Boy Friend Sacha Distel ("I'm at the end of the world with Sacha"). Sonorama comes close to justifying Editor Claude-Maxe's lofty claims with two superb records of last summer...
...were bust. Sighed she: "I can no longer take his indifference and his strange way of living." Commented Hollywood Seer Hedda Hopper: "He has a terrific following among members of the Beat Generation. He loves the adulation of a mob. After that, going home to a family must seem humdrum." Thus the handy Beat Generation label, a device more literary than lifelike that has been applied to everything from Godot* to Bardot, was formally pinned on Brando. But the experts disagreed violently about whether the actor with the sweatshirt and the lyric lunkishness really could boast the credentials...
...immemorial stone of Alexandria-Scobie, the transvestite policeman; Toto de Brunei, who dies with a hatpin rammed through his brain; Capodistria, the goatish sybarite; hare-lipped Narouz, who carries a severed head in his saddlebag; Pursewarden, who has discovered "the uselessness of having opinions" and turns to the humdrum world "the sort of smile which might have hardened on the face of a dead baby...
...satellite into orbit last October, said Mahon during debate on the $38 billion defense appropriation, "we became aroused, humiliated, angry, frustrated and determined. Now the anger has cooled and the determination has been blunted." From a "peak of awareness and urgency," the U.S. has backslid to ''the humdrum plane of complacency." And complacency is dangerous. "The Soviet threat to our pre-eminence in industry, science and military striking power is steadily increasing. We have long been accustomed to think of the U.S. as occupying an unchallenged and unchallengeable position. We cannot afford to make such assumptions today...